Text by Luiz Zerbini, Emanuele Coccia, Stefano Mancuso.
Exquisite monotypes celebrating the beauty of plants by transforming them into inky abstractions
Though he has engaged with a variety of mediums—watercolor, photography, sculpture—Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini (born 1959) has devoted the past several years to the creation of monotypes. He selects leaves, flowers and branches for their distinctive shapes and textures and places them on an inked metal plate. He then lays a large sheet of paper over the plate so that the botanical compositions are transferred onto the page. The result is a large-scale monotype print that immerses the viewer in the minute details of a plant’s anatomy.
High contrast, with a minimal palette of browns, blacks and greens, these images blur the distinction between figuration and abstraction. Over the past four years, the artist has created more than 300 monotypes in this style, working from within major museum institutions in Brazil. Now, Zerbini has collaborated with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain to collect the entire series in a single large-format volume. In these images, readers can appreciate his dedication to both the craft of printmaking and the preservation of the world’s natural beauty in unexpected ways.
Featured image is reproduced from ‘Luiz Zerbini: Botanica'.
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Featured spreads are from Luiz Zerbini: Botanica, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s eye-poppingly deluxe 10x15-inch new release collecting Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini’s exquisite botanical monotypes made by placing leaves, flowers and branches directly on inked metal plates. “Luiz Zerbini literally transfers art to the garden,” Emanuele Coccia writes. “It is no longer a question of thinking of art as a form of interspecific bovarysm; it is a question of allowing other species to practice art in the same way that human beings practice it. What was, in the past, the human study of nature and the appearance of plants—botany—becomes, thanks to this series, the ambit in which plants constantly invent and reinvent their way of appearing. Rather than being reduced to the discipline of classifying plants according to the forms they impose on their bodies, in Zerbini’s hands botany is transformed into a parade of their projections and ‘impressions.’ The book you hold in your hand is but a seismograph of their hidden dreams, the secret diary of what they would like to be, and which they never had the courage to confess.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 10 x 15 in. / 320 pgs / 300 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $110.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $154 ISBN: 9782869251656 PUBLISHER: Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris AVAILABLE: 9/7/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris. Text by Luiz Zerbini, Emanuele Coccia, Stefano Mancuso.
Exquisite monotypes celebrating the beauty of plants by transforming them into inky abstractions
Though he has engaged with a variety of mediums—watercolor, photography, sculpture—Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini (born 1959) has devoted the past several years to the creation of monotypes. He selects leaves, flowers and branches for their distinctive shapes and textures and places them on an inked metal plate. He then lays a large sheet of paper over the plate so that the botanical compositions are transferred onto the page. The result is a large-scale monotype print that immerses the viewer in the minute details of a plant’s anatomy.
High contrast, with a minimal palette of browns, blacks and greens, these images blur the distinction between figuration and abstraction. Over the past four years, the artist has created more than 300 monotypes in this style, working from within major museum institutions in Brazil. Now, Zerbini has collaborated with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain to collect the entire series in a single large-format volume. In these images, readers can appreciate his dedication to both the craft of printmaking and the preservation of the world’s natural beauty in unexpected ways.
