Arthur Luiz Piza

Arthur Luiz Piza was born on January 13, 1928, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He trained first in Sao Paulo, studying painting and fresco with Antonio Gomide during the 1940s. In the early 1950s he moved to Paris, where he studied engraving with Johnny Friedlaender, the printmaker whose Paris studio trained a generation of postwar artists in intaglio technique. Piza went on to build a body of work centered on dense, textured, often geometric compositions, worked in relief on metal printing plates as much as painted on canvas or paper.

His career gained momentum quickly on the international exhibition circuit. He won an acquisition prize at the 2nd Sao Paulo Bienal in 1953. In 1959 he received the National Grand Prize for Engraving at the 5th Sao Paulo Bienal and was included in documenta II in Kassel. Further prizes followed at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and the 2nd Florence Print Biennial in 1970, along with engraving prizes at biennials in Kraków (1970) and San Juan, Puerto Rico (1990). In Brazil he received the Grand Critics Prize in Sao Paulo in 1994, and in France he was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, though the exact year of that honor is not documented in available sources.

Piza died on May 26, 2017, in Paris, at the age of 89. Le Monde reported that friends gathered at Pere-Lachaise a week after his death to pay tribute. Most sources, including the artist's own foundation, place his death in Paris; French Wikipedia specifies the adjoining commune of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a minor discrepancy that does not affect the confirmed date.

Piza's critical standing rests on a long, well-documented run of international printmaking prizes rather than a single defining review. His inclusion in documenta II in 1959 and his repeated prizes at the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Venice Biennale, and the Florence Print Biennial placed him inside the core postwar circuit for graphic art, and his Grand Critics Prize in Sao Paulo in 1994 reflects sustained recognition in his home country over four decades. No verified verbatim quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Piza's auction market is real but thin and inconsistently documented. The auction-data aggregator Aucties describes sales of his work ranging broadly from about EUR 10 to a reported all-time record of EUR 113,550, but does not identify the specific work, auction house, or date behind that record figure, so it cannot be verified at the lot level. The same aggregator cites a 2012 sale of the work Reliefs (1982) for about EUR 70,000, again without naming the auction house or the exact date. Most of his market activity involves prints and works on paper rather than paintings. Galeria Raquel Arnaud in Sao Paulo lists and exhibits his work, and his work has also appeared in current gallery exhibitions such as a 2026 dialogue show with Almir Mavignier at Paulo Kuczynski Galeria in Sao Paulo.

Piza's market is small, largely print-based, and not consistently tracked by major price databases, which means published "record" figures should be treated with caution until the underlying lot can be verified. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance research benefits from cross-checking against the Fonds Arthur-Luiz Piza archive and against his gallery, Raquel Arnaud, which lists and exhibits his work. Given the documentation gaps around his highest recorded sales, collectors should confirm any specific price claim against a named auction house and date before relying on it.