Luiz Zerbini

In 1978, he attended the university of the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP) in São Paulo. In the early 1980s, he began working as a scenographer and showed his work for the first time in 1982 at the Casa do Brasil in Madrid, Spain. Soon after he became part of the Brazilian Geração 80 movement, which advocated a return to subjective painting. In 1995, even as he was continuing to develop his painting, he also became a founding member of the Chelpa Ferro artist's collective, a group of experimental Brazilian artists who meld plasticity and sound to create visual music, an eclectic blend of art, sound and everyday objects. Chelpa Ferro participated in the São Paulo Biennale in 2002 and 2004, as well as the Venice Biennale in 2005. Despite the fact that Zerbini practices sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as video, his medium of choice remains painting. His canvases are of impressive dimensions and create a surprisingly harmonious convergence of geometric abstraction and oniric representations of tropical flora.

The Fondation Cartier has shown Zerbini's works on several occasions in its Paris venue. In 2013, he was part of the exhibition America Latina 1960–2013: Photographs, in which he has two works entirely made up of slides. In 2018, he presented several of his monumental works in the collective exhibition Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia. His oeuvre oscillates between dream and reality as he combines historical portraits with images from the ceremonies of indigenous peoples, and freely associates organic motifs with geometrics. In 2019, the exhibition Nous les Arbres at the foundation provided him with another opportunity to show his monumental oeuvre, as he converted the main gallery into a large-scale herbarium set around a living fig tree, juxtaposing hyperrealistic paintings of the rainforest with symbols of modernity. He also presented his monotypes to the public for the first time at the exhibition.