Luiz Zerbini

Luiz Zerbini, in full Luiz Pierre Zerbini, was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1959. Sources consistently agree on the year and city; the specific date of April 28 appears in the Portuguese-language Wikipedia entry and is not independently confirmed elsewhere, so it should be treated with some caution. He began studying painting with José Antônio Van Acker and photography with Carlos Moreira in the early 1970s, and also studied watercolor with Dudi Maia Rosa. In 1978 he entered the Fine Arts program at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo. Gallery biographies describe him as graduating from FAAP with a Fine Arts degree in 1982, while at least one detailed Brazilian biographical timeline states he left the course one semester short of completion. Both accounts agree on his years of attendance and his move to Rio de Janeiro around 1982.

In Rio, Zerbini became associated with the generation of painters who staged the landmark 1984 exhibition "Como vai você, Geração 80?" at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, an exhibition widely credited with reviving painting in Brazilian contemporary art after a period dominated by conceptualism. He went on to represent Brazil at major international biennials, including the 19th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1987, the Bienal Internacional de Cuenca in 1996, the Bienal de La Habana in 2000, the Bienal do Mercosul in 2001, and the São Paulo Biennial again in 2010. In 1995 he received the Grande Prêmio da Crítica from the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte. He continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, with recent solo exhibitions including "A Mesma História Nunca É a Mesma" at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 2022, "Paisagens Ruminadas" at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in 2024, and "Estrelas Escolhidas" at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in 2026.

Zerbini is consistently framed by museums and critics as a leading figure of the Geração 80 return to painting, an artist whose grid-based compositions sit at the intersection of figuration and abstraction. Institutional writing repeatedly returns to his use of dense, tropical imagery and the grid as a structuring device for landscape, memory, and Brazilian history. His inclusion in successive São Paulo, Havana, Cuenca, and Mercosul biennials, together with the 1995 APCA critics' prize and his 2022 MASP survey, point to sustained critical and curatorial support across four decades. No exact, attributable critic quotations from major outlets could be verified for this profile.

Zerbini's market is difficult to characterize with precision. Phillips' artist page lists a confirmed sale of "Corcovado" at USD 197,000, the highest confirmed price identified for the artist in available sources, though the exact sale date is not stated there and broader auction coverage is limited, so this figure should be read as the best available data point rather than a fully documented all-time record. Separately, a 1985 painting, "A Praça," carried a pre-sale estimate of USD 80,000 to 120,000 at a Christie's New York Latin American sale in November 2015; that figure is an estimate rather than a confirmed hammer price. His primary market runs through two galleries, Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel in Brazil and Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York, both of which have mounted recent solo exhibitions of his work.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Zerbini and no documented certificate-of-authenticity program, so provenance and gallery verification through Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel or Sikkema Jenkins & Co carry extra weight. Public auction data for his work is thin and not well documented in accessible sources, so collectors should treat any single sale result, or any pre-sale estimate, with caution rather than as a reliable market benchmark. His strongest signal of durability is institutional: consistent biennial participation since the 1980s, a 2022 survey at MASP, and holdings in major Brazilian and European museum collections.