MASP PRESENTS THE FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION OF
LUIZ ZERBINI IN A SÃO PAULO MUSEUM

Artist appropriates Lina Bo Bardi's classic expographic device
to create an immersive experience

 

From April 1 to June 5, 2022, MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand presents the exhibition Luiz Zerbini: the same story is never the same, which occupies the exhibition space on the museum's second floor. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, and Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator at MASP, the exhibition brings a set of about 50 works, including paintings, monotypes, prints and drawings, mostly unpublished, distributed in an exhibition-work designed in dialogue with the architecture of the space. This is the first solo exhibition of Zerbini, one of the leading names in Brazilian contemporary art, in a museum in São Paulo, his home town. Highlighting the artist's interest in aspects of botany, the works take up narratives erased from Brazilian histories with the aim of reconstructing them from new images and protagonists. 

His solo show is based on a painting the artist made in 2014, called A primeira missa (The first mass), commissioned for the group show Histórias mestiças (Mixed-race stories), held that same year at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo. In this work, "Zerbini questions the imagery produced by the famous painting Primeira missa no Brasil (1860), by Victor Meirelles (1832-1903), reinventing the image and the very narrative of the first days of the infamous encounter between invaders and indigenous people at the beginning of the Brazilian colonial process," comments curator Guilherme Giufrida. The sense of reconstruction of history is, in this case, the displacement of the point of view: now, the intention is to see through other subjects, whether human, vegetable or animal, the scene of this invasion of worlds caused by the arrival of the Portuguese.

As Giufrida describes, "the artist assumes the gesture of agencying images that have solidified themselves as illustrations of facts that were, in fact, invented by them. It is thus a matter of reimagining the stories, giving them new representations, bringing out other ideas and protagonists". The exhibition, therefore, intends to use this procedure to approach moments and clashes in the country's history. An example of this are the four new large-scale paintings, created especially for the show: Haximu Massacre (2020), Useless Landscape (2020), Rio das Mortes (2021) and Canudos did not surrender (2021).

Added to the set of paintings is a selection of dozens of monotypes from the series Macunaíma (2017), conceived for an edition of the novel Macunaíma: the hero with no character (1928), by Mário de Andrade (1893-1945). In them, Zerbini translates the narrative of Andrade's book - which tells the life story of an indigenous subject and his intense transformations - from the appropriation of the native vegetation of the protagonist's scenario, evident in the paper supports.

 

SERVICE
LUIZ ZERBINI: THE SAME STORY IS NEVER THE SAME
1.04 - 5.06.22
MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
Avenida Paulista, 1578 - Bela Vista
01310-200 São Paulo, SP
Phone: (11) 3149-5959
Hours: Tuesday free Qualicorp, from 10am to 8pm (entry until 7pm); Wednesday to Sunday, from 10am to
6pm (entry until 5pm); closed on Mondays
Booking online required through the link masp.org.br/ingressos
Tickets: R$ 50 (admission); R$ 25 (half-entry)