Arthur Luiz Piza (1928-2017)

Among the generation of young Latin American artists who arrived in Paris in the 1950s, Piza came to work under the master printer Johnny Friedlaender, with whom he studied techniques of metal engraving. In his prints as well as in collages and metal assemblages, he has long explored the (im)materiality of space, the nature of light and transparency, and the plasticity of abstraction. The present work belongs to a series of sculptures called “Weaves,” in which colored, geometric plaques float between meshes that open like a book, its surfaces both luminously optical and materially dense.