Frieze Los Angeles

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents a new body of work by Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini for Frieze Los Angeles, marking the artist's debut exhibition in the city. The solo presentation includes dynamic paintings and monotypes and shows the immersive and seductive quality of Brazil’s natural environment. 

In a career spanning over three decades, Zerbini has developed a complex visual vocabulary rooted at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. He first emerged within the generational and global ‘return to painting’ of the 1980s, centred in Rio de Janeiro around the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts. The artist was subsequently defined by the landmark exhibition ‘Como vai você Geração 80?’ (How Are You Doing, 80s Generation?, 1984).  

Juxtaposing hard-edged geometry with organic pattern, Zerbini’s paintings are an optical sensation, and evoke a blend of modernist architecture and lush tropical flora. By incorporating sweeping curves, fluid textures and vivid colours, the artist emulates the intoxicating effects of the sights and sounds of the rainforest. The works are “a reflection of the place I live,” Zerbini explains. “Rio de Janeiro has a huge forest just inside of the city. Everything is mixed. It’s an urban landscape, but it’s really full of nature.”   

The grid – an emblem of modernism – is typically associated with the static, antinatural and systematic. Zerbini often uses a quadrangular grid as a primary structuring device, which subtly nods to the mosaic pavements and façades of Brazilian tower blocks. In the vibrant painting 'Erótica' (2023), Zerbini transforms the grid’s tight squares into lenses of a kaleidoscopic vision. Monstera leaves and Calla lily flowers are layered over the work’s gridded structure, revealing appropriated patterns found in nature that were incorporated into his own vernacular. The artist takes elements of the grid in 'Sea Bubbles' (2023) to lend the expressive composition a rhythmic quality, recalling the movement of water or trees swaying in the breeze. Flooding the viewer’s perception, Zerbini seeks to convey the impression of “being in the painting as you could be in a forest.” 

Zerbini’s monotypes echo the collaged appearance of his paintings, combining abstract mark making with figurative elements drawn from his everyday surroundings. “For me, I would pass the whole world through the press,” the artist declares. In these new monotypes, Zerbini hand-paints the frames, marking a significant development in the artist’s monotype series.