Luiz Zerbini: Botanica, Monotypes 2016-2020

Luiz Zerbini, born in São Paulo in 1959, graduated from the Fine Arts School of the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP). He studied painting, then photography and watercolour. Today, he sculpts, draws, takes photographs, makes videos and paints canvases of impressive dimensions, where urban landscapes, Brazilian folklore and the lush nature of the tropical flora unfold in a rich palette of colours. Zerbini has exhibited all over the world and participated in many biennials including; São Paulo (1987 and 2010), Cuenca (1996), Havana (2000) and Morcosul Biennial (2001). He is a founding member of the Chelpa Ferro group, which participated in the São Paulo Biennial in 2002 and 2004. In 2018, he exhibited works at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, for the group exhibition Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia. A mixture of historical portraits and images of Amerindian ceremonies, combining organic and geometrical motifs, his works fluctuate between dreamlike and realistic. In 2019, Trees, presented at the Fondation Cartier, gave him the opportunity to exhibit his monotypes for the first time. Emanuele Coccia is an Italian Philosopher and Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. Passionate about botany, he is the author of Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016) and The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Medford: Polity Press, 2018). Stefano Mancuso an Italian biologist, professor at the University of Florence, member of the Accademia dei Georgofili (a Florentine institution promoting the study of agronomy, forestry, economics, and agrarian geography) and founder of the International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology.