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 Tênis 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 Histórias Brasileiras at Museu de Arte de São 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.
