psychic investment that charges these works is lacking in others, such as Jazz wall (no.25; Fig.17), in which her facial image registers as little more than a form of cosplay.
The earliest incarnations of what would become her dominant subject in those fertile years may be a remarkable series of little-known drawings from around 1957. Among the show’s revelations, they were made at a time when Marisol was firmly ensconced within de Kooning’s orbit. Rapidly sketched studies (no.83; Fig.18) of the fraught mother–child dyad, they conjure ferocious pregnant mothers, child-bearing women, infants and toddlers. Their palette borrowed from a child’s colouring book, they are imbued with a raucous, unbridled immediacy. Hindsight positions them as protofeminist ripostes to the Dutchman’s controversial paintings of women – bawds, harridans and castrating ‘Moms’, in the parlance of the day. With their virulent combination of violence and vulgarity, de Kooning’s vixens rocked America’s critical establishment, cultural elites and self-styled vanguards in the 1950s. Had Marisol’s claustrophobic compositions, disturbingly overlaying artistic with biological procreation, been known in the 1960s, the trivialising impulse to frame her as a ‘dollmaker’ might have skewed differently.
Although it never explicitly critiques past ‘wrongs’, Marisol: A Retrospective presents a rich trove of archival material and works of art for viewers curious to better understand the misrepresentations that contributed to the artist’s near disappearance from mainstream art history. Determinedly forward-facing, the exhibition eschews revisionist perspectives that would situate her in more nuanced multivocal narratives. The introductory text, designed to frame the visitor’s experience, heralds the anticipatory character of her art by highlighting her engagement with subjects urgent today: immigrant experience, interpersonal violence, global inequities and our interdependence with oceanic life. Implicitly foregrounding work from the later decades, this orientation comes with a hefty price tag.2
1 The exhibition was shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (7th October 2023–21st January 2024), the Toledo Museum of Art (2nd March–2nd June 2024) and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (12th July 2024–6th January 2025) before travelling to Dallas.
2 Catalogue: Marisol: A Retrospective Edited by Cathleen Chaffee. 272 pp. incl. 275 col. ills. (Buffalo AKG Art Museum and DelMonico Books, New York, 2023), $75.
ISBN 978–1–63681–101–7. Notable essays that follow this model by largely setting aside biographically based contextualised readings are D. Solomons: ‘Babies, nuclear giants, and other monsters’, pp.67–88; and J. Vázquez: ‘Marisol underwater, 1970–1973’, pp.105–22. For an analysis of how those complex but crucial questions might be posed, see K.K. Ronan: ‘The perils of being folk’, in L. Cooke, ed.: Boundary Trouble in American Vanguard Art, Washington 2021, pp.147–65 and 321–24.
Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão: Between Your Teeth Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon 11th April–22nd September
by kathryn lloyd
First published in 1928, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (‘Cannibalist Manifesto’) proposed a radical model for national cultural identity. In the face of colonial European dominance, he argued that one should neither mimic nor reject Western influence, but
instead devour it, swallowing the ‘sacred enemy’ in order to metabolise its forms into something distinctly Brazilian.1 Anthropophagy became a foundational strategy in Brazilian Modernism, offering artists a means to confront colonial legacies through reuse, appropriation, assimilation and subversion. Nearly a century after Andrade catalysed the Anthropophagic movement, the manifesto remains a central reference in the work of the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão (b.1964).2 Creating hybrid forms that exist somewhere between painting and sculpture, Varejão reactivates Andrade’s cultural cannibalism as both method and metaphor, drawing on the carnality of lacerated ‘flesh’ and exposed ‘meat’ to reconfigure aesthetic traditions and their brutal histories.
Between Your Teeth at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon (CAM), situates Varejão’s practice in dialogue with that of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego (1935–2022). The title, taken from a poem by Hilda Hilst (1930–2004), echoes the ‘metaphorical devouring of otherness’ (p.14) championed in Andrade’s manifesto, while also invoking the violent intimacy that characterises both artists’ work.3 This large-scale exhibition is not the
first pairing of the two artists. Instigated by the gallerist Márcia Fortes, a selection of their work was shown sideby-side at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, in 2017. Between Your Teeth, in some ways, acts as an extension of that project, although inevitably differentiated by Rego’s death three years before it opened. Although Varejão and Rego were born three decades apart on different continents, their careers coincided for some thirty years, from around 1990 to 2022, during which they pursued distinct yet related concerns, converging around themes of trauma, the body and power; it is this period that the exhibition takes as its focus. Despite these shared preoccupations, however, their methods and visual languages are strikingly different. Varejão’s engagement with history is marked by a corporeal literalism: she wounds her surfaces, gouging, peeling and incising layers of paint or polyurethane to reveal visceral
‘innards’. By contrast, Rego reinterprets narrative traditions, fables, myths and Catholic iconography, translating them into psychologically charged scenes of female autonomy and vulnerability. Temporary walls have been erected in CAM’s Nave gallery to create thirteen discrete rooms, with a total of seventy-three works on display. Each room establishes a thematic dialogue between the two artists. The first, titled ‘I Was Land, a Womb, a Torn Sail’, serves almost as a prologue, setting out the terms of each artist’s inquiry. The small, cubicle-like space is covered with a dense, blood-red Baroque-inflected wallpaper created by Varejão, giving rise to an uneasy claustrophobic effect. Here, Rego’s First Mass in Brazil (cat. no.3; Fig.20), in which she reimagines Victor Meirelles’s 1860 painting depicting the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500 (1861; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro), is shown alongside Varejão’s Map of Lopo Homem (1992;
21. Extirpation of evil by incision, by Adriana Varejão. 1994. Oil on canvas and hospital objects, dimensions variable. (© Adriana Varejão; private collection; exh. Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon).
private collection; no.4) and Bastard son II (interior scene) (1997; private collection; no.5). Created in the 1990s – a time when postcolonial studies were still largely confined to academia – the works address the cruel logic of conquest, of both land and body. In Rego’s painting a young woman in a dark, heavy dress lies on a bed, her belly swollen with pregnancy, her gaze glassy and vacant. Behind her, in the top-right hand corner, is a painting: Rego’s ‘visual paraphrase’ (p.137) of Meirelles’s original work, which is often interpreted as a foundational myth of Brazil’s colonial past. Varejão’s Bastard son is altogether more explicit. Drawing on the early nineteenth-century watercolours of Jean-Baptiste Debret, she invents a moment of violent encounter in which a ‘master’ rapes an enslaved woman. Nearby, two naked Indigenous women are held captive by men dressed in elaborate uniforms. The artist has incised a deep, ragged gash on the
surface of work, revealing a bloodied interior beneath the skin of paint. What is made clear, then, is that this is a conversation between history and storytelling, disclosure and allusion, spectacle and restraint. Varejão relies on theatricality and artificiality, taking much of her visual lexicon from the Brazilian Baroque. As she notes in the catalogue, her materials are always staged: the historically loaded azulejo tiles she frequently incorporates are painted replications, never actual tiles; flesh, of course, is never actual flesh. Rego, on the other hand, often constructed a kind of theatre in her studio, using props and costumes as models for her paintings. Where Rego accessed the political through the private, Varejão uses simulation and excess to materially explode the façades that obscure and perpetuate colonial and violent frameworks. Her sculptural paintings – in which blood, guts and entrails become a form of perverse ornamentation – exist in a strange paradox where what is metaphorical is also, in a way, literal. They are blunt, brutal and, at times, bereft of all except impact.
This is perhaps most evident in the sixth section, ‘Extirpations’, which brings together works that explore the body, suffering and healing. Rego’s Triptych (1998; Abbot Hall, Lakeland
Arts Trust, Kendal; no.34), made after a failed referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal, and Sleeper (1994; private collection; no.36) are shown alongside three of Varejão’s painting installations. The confrontational Green tiles in raw flesh (2000; Tate; no.32) stands at three metres tall and projects nearly seventy centimetres into the gallery. Its apparent ‘tiled’ surface has been ripped open, exposing writhing insides that evoke organs and entrails, as well as dismembered doll parts. Extirpation of evil by incision (no.35; Fig.21) extends the physicality of painting even further. A large canvas has been painted to resemble a patch of skin, tattooed with a design drawn from azulejo tiles. Varejão has sliced into the canvas, peeling away the tattoo to expose angry welts underneath. The detached membrane has been placed on a neighbouring hospital stretcher: a crumpled and withered lump that mirrors the strained position of Rego’s recumbent Sleeper. A similar tension between interiority and exteriority emerges in ‘Body in Trance’. Rego’s Possession I–VII (2004; Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto) – seven pastel works showing a woman in positions based on nineteenth-century photographs of various stages of ‘hysteria’ – is shown alongside Varejão’s Tongues series (1998; nos.46–49). The woman in Rego’s
work, sprawled across a psychiatrist’s couch, twists and turns in a trance-like state, imbuing the sequence with an iterative, filmic rhythm. In Tongues purple-red flesh ruptures the ordered ornamentation of azulejos, unfurling like a screaming mouth or a gateway into a craggy hellscape. Both series enact a ‘theater of the body’ (p.37), as one of the curators, Helena de Freitas, describes it, in which interior forces –psychic, erotic, pathological – convulse against systems of order.
Throughout the exhibition, Varejão’s works enact a performative, abject excess. Through sheer volume, this can become affectless, undone by its own accumulation. This is made only more apparent by Rego’s oblique mode of address, even when her subject-matter is wholly unambiguous. However, Varejão’s muted paintings of saunas and baths, which she began in 2001, offer a kind of respite: eerily vacant, these works trade visceral spectacle for a threatening sterility. The sanitised geometry of The seducer (2004; private collection; no.18), for example, inexplicably suggests a latent violence. In the following room, ‘Cleansing Rituals’, works such as The guest (no.31; Fig.22) serve to corroborate this suspension, as red stains bloom across otherwise pristine white tiles. Through a ‘contamination’ with Rego’s etchings on abortion, these works ‘ultimately reinforce their meaning’ (p.27). Here, it is Rego’s stark depictions of an embodied reality that lend a clarity and urgency to Varejão’s comparably allusive scenes.
Although Rego and Varejão clearly share certain affinities – both in work and in life – this does not always produce a mutually beneficial exchange. With the exception of a few rooms, their sensibilities often seem to distract from, rather than complement, one another. Nonetheless, Varejão remains an uncompromising artist – one who, in the spirit of anthropophagy, voraciously consumes complex histories to create a uniquely unsettling iconography. As she remarks in the catalogue, ‘devour me in order to decipher me!’ (p.14). Here, with or without Rego, she certainly provides the viewer with much – perhaps too much – to set between their teeth.
1 L. Barry: ‘Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto”’, Latin American Literary Review 19, no.38 (1991), pp.38–47, at p.43.
2 Andrade wrote the manifesto as a response to Abaporu (1928), a painting by his wife, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), who was also a founder of the movement.
3 Catalogue: Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão: Between Your Teeth. Edited by Adriana Varejão, Helena de Freitas and Victor Gorgulho. 152 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Lenz, Milan, and Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2025), €35. ISBN 979–12–80579–58–4.
Robyn Kahukiwa: Tohunga Mahi Toi
Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery, Hamilton 16th May–7th September
by mark stocker
Tohunga Mahi Toi (expert maker of art) is a modest but intelligent retrospective of Robyn Kahukiwa (1938–2025), which assumed poignant significance after her death in April this year.1 Kahukiwa was the foremost Māori artist of her generation in New Zealand, or, as she called the country, Aotearoa. Although Ralph Hotere (1931–2013) was more critically fashionable and elegant, he preferred to be regarded purely as an artist and quite separately as a Māori. By contrast, for Kahukiwa, Indigenous identity and vocation had equal significance and were inseparable. She embraced her Māori heritage with a convert’s passion. Although her mother had lineage from several tribes, principally Ngāti Porou, Kahukiwa was born in Sydney, educated in Adelaide, trained and worked at the Adelaide News art studio before settling in New Zealand in 1959. It would be a mistake to underplay her Australian background, given that it was there that she received the training on which she partly based her practice, while selfeducation made up the balance.
Marriage and family occupied her life in the 1960s; only in the early 1970s did she become an artistic presence. Even then, her output was limited by her employment as an art teacher, and it was not until 1982 that she became a full-time artist. However, her formidable work ethic amply compensated for her delayed start.
She produced hundreds of paintings, prints, posters and murals, practising almost to the end of her life.
Kahukiwa’s paintings of the 1970s are solid and precise in colouring and weighty in form. They focus on working-class Māori and Pacific Islanders who had recently relocated to the city and are alienated from their traditional, ancestral culture and heritage as well as from Pākehā (New Zealand European) prosperity. Their lives of quiet desperation are conveyed in The migration (1973; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington), which is absent from the exhibition. Kahukiwa deftly assimilates the influences of Paul Gauguin in the colours, Vincent van Gogh in the perspective and Henry Moore in the robust, stoic mother figure. Probably the finest work of this phase is The choice (Fig.23), in which a young Māori woman contemplates a white mask. Her whanau (family) are gathered beside a carved meeting house on the left, and her streetwise but aimless friends on the right. Beside her is a shattered tiki (human figure carving), suggesting the death of her ancestry and impending tragedy. Some critics labelled these early works gauche and they are still called naive,
23. The choice, by Robyn Kahukiwa. 1974. Oil on board, 97 by 126 cm. (Pātaka Art + Museum, Porirua; exh. Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery, Hamilton).
but they are neither: everything in Kahukiwa’s art is carefully composed and there for a purpose. Her art is readable, graphic, always figurative and sometimes – as here – moving. Kahukiwa’s best-known works are eight large canvases that constitute the series Wahine Toa (women of strength, power, courage), which toured the country in 1983. Six are on display here (Fig.24). They mark the culmination of Kahukiwa’s own education in the inspirational stories of her distant women ancestors and the roles they played in creation myths. Their success led to her collaboration with the author Patricia Grace on the book Wahine Toa: Women of Maori Myth (1984). Immaculately rendered, the paintings are diagrammatic, programmatic, didactic and compelling. They function as portals to the pūrākau, the oral tales central to the Māori world view. Yet they were initially spurned by some parts of the art establishment and were rejected, for example, by the Auckland City Art Gallery. This was because their realism then appeared illustrative and unfashionable. Some Māori men, decidedly wary of Kahukiwa’s glorification of warrior-goddesses, also felt discomfort about the series. This
