LOS ANGELES, CA.- David Zwirner is presenting paintings by Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900–1995), on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Marking Lorenzato’s fourth solo show with the gallery and the first exhibition of his work in California, this presentation anticipates a major solo exhibition—the largest and most significant survey of the artist’s work to date—opening at the Pinacoteca de So Paulo in 2027.
Among the foremost Brazilian artists of his generation, Lorenzato developed a singular body of paintings centered on his fastidious observations of everyday subjects and scenes in his hometown of Belo Horizonte. His distinctive compositions, characterized by reduced geometric forms and densely textured surfaces, distill the vitality and natural beauty of his surroundings into deceptively simple images that are imbued with an assured freedom of expression. As curator Rodrigo Moura notes, “Lorenzato’s paintings are not only born out of the desire to construct his own reality but also to contain the other dimensions that coexist within it, such as gesture, nature, and silence.”
This exhibition features color-blocked landscapes, vivid domestic scenes, and contemplative still lifes that exemplify the innovative modernism of Lorenzato’s practice. Throughout the works on view, which span the productive last three decades of the artist’s career, we see subjects both natural and manmade treated with the same sharp attention to color, line, and form. Spherical suns against billowing clouds, branching vines and blooming sunflowers, stretch to all edges of the composition like a geometric maze. In other paintings, a colorful modernist grid depicts textiles suspended from a clothesline, illustrating Lorenzato’s characteristic use of hard-edged shapes to suggest objects in real space.
Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato was born in 1900 to Italian parents who immigrated to Brazil in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1920, the artist moved with his parents to Italy, where he worked various construction and painting jobs on and off throughout Europe. Though he studied for a brief period at the Reale Accademia delle Arti in Vicenza, in 1925, Lorenzato was mostly self-taught, and he developed his technical proficiency in painting through a job restoring frescoes in Rome, having previously worked as a mural painter in Brazil.
Lorenzato permanently returned to Belo Horizonte in 1948, and after sustaining an injury to his leg in 1956, he committed himself to painting full time. In 1964, he had his first solo exhibition at the Minas Tnis Clube in Belo Horizonte, followed by his inclusion in two group shows there the following year and a second solo exhibition in 1967. In the decades following, his work was exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Brazil, including a retrospective exhibition at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, in 1995—the year of the artist’s death. In 1972, Lorenzato represented Brazil in the third Triennial of Self-Taught Art in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia.
In 2019, Lorenzato’s first solo exhibition outside of Brazil was presented at David Zwirner London. In 2022, the artist’s work was included in the major group exhibition Histrias Brasileiras at Museu de Arte de So Paulo, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, which was part of a two-year program at the museum celebrating the bicentennial of Brazilian independence. Lorenzato was included in the 60th Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, organized by Pedrosa in 2024.
Lorenzato’s work is represented in public collections internationally, including Fundao Clvis Salgado, Belo Horizonte; He Art Museum, Foshan, China; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Museu de Arte de So Paulo; Nouveau Muse National de Monaco; Pinacoteca de So Paulo; and Universidade Federal de Viosa, Brazil.
In 2023, with the support of Brazilian cultural institute Ita Cultural, the Projeto Lorenzato was established with the mission of identifying and digitally cataloguing the artist’s work.
