Published by Museu de Arte de São Paulo/KMEC Books. Edited with text by Adriano Pedrosa, Guilherme Giufrida. Text by Clarissa Diniz, Fred Coelho, Kleber Amancio, Lilia Schwarcz, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Naine Terena.
Brazilian painter, sculptor, photographer and installation artist Luiz Zerbini (born 1959) works at the intersection of figuration and abstraction and is one of the primary figures of the Geração 80. This generation of artists, coming together in 1980s Brazil, embraced subjectivism in painting, reacting to the austere sculptural works of the previous decade. This volume follows the artist’s exhibition at MASP, his first solo show at a museum in São Paulo. The curatorial conception of the exhibition was born from Zerbini’s painting A Primeira Missa (2014), in which the artist interrogates the canonical 19th-century painting by Victor Meirelles (1861), reimagining the scene between the Portuguese colonizers and the indigenous people of Brazil. For the exhibition, Zerbini created four new paintings that follow this revisionist procedure. The book includes these new works as well as a suite of monoprints.
Published by Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris. Text by Luiz Zerbini, Emanuele Coccia, Stefano Mancuso.
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.
Luiz Zerbini: Botanica