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Adriana Varejão’s Rio de Janeiro studio is designed to stay in conversation with the outdoors: its tall accordion doors are often left open to a bird-visited courtyard, letting daylight and the climate of the city into the workspace. The arrangement is practical, but it also offers a useful way to understand an artist whose work moves between Brazilian history, colonial legacies, Baroque imagery and ceramic traditions from several cultures. A November 2025 Architectural Digest profile documents how the property evolved and how Varejão uses it as both a working studio and a social place.
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What is Adriana Varejão’s Rio studio like?
The studio sits in Rio’s Jardim Botânico area, in the Horto setting, behind the house Varejão bought in 1994. Its defining threshold is a set of tall accordion doors that she often keeps open “rain or shine.” The doors frame a courtyard where local birds frequently stop and bring natural light deep into the workspace. Rather than presenting the studio as a sealed, neutral container, the feature describes a room that is visibly and atmospherically connected to its surroundings.
That openness fits Rio’s long-standing indoor-outdoor sensibility and the influence of modernist architecture in Brazil. It also resonates with the mobility of Varejão’s practice, which adapts to different histories, materials and places. The connection is interpretive rather than a documented claim that the doors produced a particular painting: the architecture provides a lens through which to see the artist’s interest in cultural exchange and changing contexts.
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How did the property develop?
The studio is the result of several building campaigns rather than a single architect’s finished plan.
- 1994: Varejão purchased the property, which originally contained two buildings.
- Before 2000: One building was demolished. Varejão lived and worked in the remaining structure.
- 2000: Architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez designed and built a freestanding workspace behind the house.
- A little more than a decade later: Architect Lia Siqueira renovated the buildings and inserted a patio between them, creating a stronger physical continuity.
Siqueira also painted the iron dividers in the house’s industrial-style lattice windows and the studio doors a deep gray-green. Those interventions make the property read as a connected sequence of rooms and thresholds instead of a front house plus an unrelated rear annex. The patio is especially important: it is not merely circulation, but the outdoor hinge that joins domestic, administrative and artistic activity.
What happens inside the front building?
The original front building no longer functions simply as a residence. It contains office, library and storage areas, giving Varejão’s operation the infrastructure of a working art practice: places for research, administration and the preservation of materials and works.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsA former bedroom has another life. Varejão and her team use it for yoga, a detail that shows how the studio accommodates bodies and routines as well as paintings. The property therefore combines the practical needs of an art business with the informal patterns of a shared workplace. It is neither a purely private home nor a factory-like production floor.
The studio also has a community-facing role. Varejão invites local people to preview gatherings before exhibitions. These events turn the property into a point of contact between the artist, her neighborhood and the people who will encounter the work publicly. The arrangement matters because it places social exchange alongside solitary concentration and logistical work.
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Why does Varejão leave the doors open?
The immediate reasons are straightforward: open doors provide daylight, a view of the courtyard and ventilation, while allowing the studio to participate in Rio’s climate. The Architectural Digest account says they remain open in fair weather and rain, making openness a habitual condition rather than a staged gesture for visitors.
There is also a broader architectural reading. Rio’s modernist tradition frequently treats landscape, shade and air as part of a building’s experience. Varejão’s studio follows that logic by allowing the courtyard to remain visually and physically present during work. The boundary is adjustable: the doors can close when needed, but their normal position keeps the interior porous.
It is useful not to overstate the symbolism. No source says that the open doors directly caused a specific series or composition. Instead, the feature places the architecture beside an artistic practice that continually crosses boundaries—between local and foreign references, historical periods, decorative traditions and contemporary painting. The open threshold becomes a concise image for that adaptability.
How does the studio connect to Varejão’s art?
Varejão is a Brazilian artist working across media whose subjects include the country’s past and the legacies of colonialism. Her engagement with the Baroque began early: the profile reports that visits in her twenties to eighteenth-century churches in Minas Gerais became a sustained point of interest. The churches’ theatrical surfaces, ornament and historical contradictions remain relevant to the way her work handles architecture and memory.
Her references are deliberately cross-cultural. Recent bodies of work described in the studio feature draw on Greek, Iznik and Song-dynasty pottery, as well as terra-cotta pots made in Maragogipinho, a ceramics community in Bahia. The range is not a claim that these traditions are interchangeable. Rather, Varejão examines how objects, motifs and techniques travel, are collected and acquire new meanings through contact.
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The Fondation Cartier’s artist profile provides complementary context, emphasizing her engagement with colonialism and slavery, Portuguese azulejos, Chinese ceramics and the tensions of cultural exchange. Those themes help explain why a courtyard-facing studio is more than a picturesque setting: it is a place where multiple histories and visual languages are assembled, tested and reinterpreted.
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Works in progress shown in the feature display Varejão’s recognizable craquelure, the fissured surface effect that can make a painted or ceramic field appear aged, broken or excavated. In the studio, that surface is seen before a work becomes a finished exhibition object, alongside the tools, storage and open space that support its making.
What does Varejão say about a more inward kind of art?
While discussing Giorgio Morandi, Varejão says she admires “a kind of work that was very inside, very connected to his intimate way of life.” The quotation is important because the feature uses it to establish a contrast, not a rejection. Morandi’s inward concentration is set against Varejão’s own work, which the article describes as adapting to different stories and places.
Her Rio studio embodies that distinction without turning it into a simple opposition. It offers rooms for private research and making, but it also opens to birds, weather, daylight and neighbors. The same property can hold an intimate working rhythm, a team yoga session, a library consultation and a local preview. The architecture makes room for both inward attention and outward exchange.
How does the studio function before and after exhibitions?
Varejão describes two especially revealing moments. After exhibition works have shipped, she enjoys seeing the walls empty. The cleared surfaces create a pause in which the studio is no longer crowded by completed objects and can be read as a room again.
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Before a show, the atmosphere changes. The studio becomes a preparation site and a gathering place, with local people invited for a preview. These cycles—empty walls after shipping and concentrated activity before an opening—show the workplace as temporary and changeable. Storage, office and display functions have to flex around the exhibition calendar, while the courtyard and doors provide a steady spatial framework.
Where does the Rio setting matter most?
Jardim Botânico and the surrounding Horto area place the studio in a lush part of Rio rather than an anonymous industrial zone. The courtyard’s visiting birds are a recurring presence in the feature, and the natural light changes how the room is experienced across the day. The setting does not explain every work, but it clarifies why an open connection to landscape is a practical and visual priority.
Rio also supplies a historical and architectural context for Varejão’s concerns. Brazilian modernism made the relationship between building and landscape a central design question, while the country’s colonial and imperial histories remain embedded in churches, tiles, ceramics and collections. Her studio sits within that layered environment: contemporary production takes place among living vegetation and inherited visual traditions.
What is known about Varejão’s current career context?
Varejão was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964 and continues to live and work there, according to Gagosian’s January 2026 biography. That biography lists 2025 exhibitions in Athens and New York, useful dated context for an artist whose studio practice remains based in Rio. Exhibition references in the 2025 Architectural Digest feature were forward-looking at the time of publication, so they should not be read as a current schedule without separate confirmation.
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The most revealing lesson is organizational. Varejão’s workplace is not a single-purpose room: it is a network of thresholds and supporting spaces. A rear studio handles making; the front building handles office work, books and storage; the patio links the structures; the former bedroom supports team yoga; and the courtyard supplies light, air and an ever-changing view.
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That arrangement also complicates the familiar image of the artist’s studio as an isolated retreat. Varejão’s practice depends on historical research, material references, assistants and public encounters as well as solitary decisions. The open doors make those relationships legible without claiming that the building dictates the art. They show a working environment prepared to receive outside conditions and to send finished work back into the world.
Is there a substantial book on Varejão’s work?
For readers who want a physical survey, the 2022 English-language hardcover Adriana Varejão from Rizzoli Electa is a 288-page monograph containing essays and an interview. Its ISBN is 978-0-8478-6770-7. Publication details are available from the Rizzoli New York listing; a separate Gagosian Shop listing also identifies the edition. Availability and pricing can change, so check the current listings before ordering.
Why the open-door image endures
Varejão’s studio is memorable not because it offers a single dramatic architectural trick, but because ordinary decisions accumulate into a portrait of practice. Doors stay open to weather and birds; a patio joins old and new buildings; a library and storage rooms support research and preservation; a bedroom becomes a yoga room; and the same walls alternate between emptiness, production and neighborhood gatherings.
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Seen this way, the studio’s openness is both practical and emblematic. It expresses Rio’s climate and architectural culture while echoing an art practice attentive to movement between cultures, materials and histories. The courtyard does not provide a neat explanation for Varejão’s paintings. It does, however, show the kind of environment in which an adaptable, historically engaged practice can remain connected to the world outside its doors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where in Rio de Janeiro is Adriana Varejão’s studio?
The studio is in Rio’s Jardim Botânico area, in the surrounding Horto setting. It occupies a property that combines the original house with a separate rear workspace and a later connecting patio.
Who designed Adriana Varejão’s studio buildings?
Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez designed the freestanding workspace built behind the house in 2000. More than a decade later, Lia Siqueira renovated the buildings and added the patio that links them.
What materials and traditions inform Varejão’s recent work?
The studio feature cites Greek, Iznik and Song-dynasty pottery, plus terra-cotta pots from Maragogipinho in Bahia. Her broader practice also engages Portuguese azulejos, Baroque art and the histories of colonialism and slavery.
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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteWhat is the ISBN of the 2022 Adriana Varejão monograph?
The Rizzoli Electa hardcover monograph’s ISBN is 978-0-8478-6770-7. It is an English-language, 288-page volume with essays and an interview.
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