Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão will represent Brazil at the 2026 Venice Biennale
Two of Brazil’s top artists, Rosana Paulino from São Paulo and Adriana Varejão from Rio de Janeiro, will represent the country at the next Venice Biennale, scheduled to open in May 2026.
Their exhibition will be curated by Diane Lima, an independent curator based in São Paulo and El Salvador. Lima recently co-curated the 2023 São Paulo Biennale and organized a survey of Paul Nazareth at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. She was awarded the Ford Foundation Global Fellowship focused on social justice in 2021 and edited the 2024 anthology Negros na Piscina: Contemporary Art, Curadoria and Education (Black people are
Pool: Contemporary Art, Curatorial and Education). She also currently serves as Vice-President of the Scientific Advisory Board of Documenta and Friedrich Museum in Kassel, Germany.
Andrea Pinheiro, president of the São Paulo Biennale Foundation, said in a statement: “Diane Lima’s curation and the participation of Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão once again demonstrate the power and complexity of Brazil’s output on the international stage.”
The upcoming Brazilian pavilion will be titled “Comigo ninguém pode,” a popular Brazilian proverb that can be translated as “No one can deal with me” or “No one can beat me”; the phrase also doubles as the Portuguese name Dieffenbachia plant, known in English as dumb cane or leopard lily. The pavilion’s title “exploits these ambiguities as metaphors for conservation, toxicity and resilience,” according to a press release.
Both artists from the same generation are known for their practices that deal with Brazil’s colonial history, its legacy in the present day, and the ways in which these histories are rewritten and reimagined as means of liberation.
“Historically, Paolino and Varejao together represent the most revolutionary aspects of women in national art,” Lima said in a statement. “Their poetics echo the struggles of social movements and democracy in harmony and friction, but without losing a sensitive ability to amaze and surprise us with a high level of technical quality.”
She continued, “Besides the idea of protection and toxicity, Comigo ninguém podeIn popular parlance, it also refers to the process of transferring knowledge of nature into the realm of life, thus reflecting the process of collective expression that naturally occurs when “I” becomes “we”, becomes many people, and an entire nation uses its wisdom as a form of defense and sovereignty.
Paolino’s practice spans painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, collage and installation, with a particular focus on the experiences of black women in Brazilian society. When she won the $25,000 Munch Prize last year, she told art news”, “For the past 30 years I have been following black women and the black population in Brazil, but not everyone understands [the challenges we face]. Brazil is often seen as a racial democracy, but it is not, so we must fight. “
She has had solo exhibitions at MALBA in Buenos Aires, the Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany, and the Museum of Art in Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been shown in major exhibitions such as the São Paulo Biennale 2023, the Venice Biennale 2022 and the Sydney Biennale 2020, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Black Planet Project: Pan-African Art and Culture (2023), M HKA Antwerp’s Lives of Animals (2023) and Histórico Brasilas (2022) and Histórias Afro-Atlanticas” (2018), both on display at the São Paulo Art Museum. She has been awarded the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and France.
“Coming to the Brazilian pavilion in Venice with Adriana Varejao is an opportunity to investigate colonial trauma from different female perspectives that come together in an unprecedented dialogue,” Paulino said in a statement. “This encounter proposes a revision of art history, paving the way for new possibilities for the future by questioning the canon and recovering silenced memories.”
Since the 1990s, Varejão has been known for his paintings and sculptures in which entrails are embedded in or appear to spill out of tiled architectural fragments. These blue and white tiles are called Glazing tiles Originating in Portugal, it links to Brazil’s past as a Portuguese colony and serves as a metaphor for what lies beneath the seemingly pristine surface.
She has had solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in São Paulo, the Tamayo Museum, the Modena Art Museum in Bahia, El Salvador, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, among others. Her work has been exhibited at the 1998 and 1994 São Paulo Biennales, the 2006 and 1999 Liverpool Biennales, the 2011 Istanbul Biennale, the 2001 Sydney Biennale and the 1994 Havana Biennale.
“Rosana Paolino’s work and mine,” Varejao said in the statement, “are intertwined in the power of colonial trauma, a theme that structures the DNA of our work and runs through our research in a visceral way. I hope to start a unique dialogue with Rosanna, but also to connect with the architecture of the pavilion, expanding the possibilities of our artistic paths.”
