Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato was born in Brazil in 1900 and today he is considered one of the most important latin american painters of his generation. Apart from a short séjour at Reale Accademia delle Arti in Vicenza, Italy, in 1925, he had no formal training and was largely self-taught. His parents emigrated to Brazil from Italy in the last decade of the nineteenth century. As the Spanish flu hit the country, the family left again for Europe. Between 1920 and 1948 Lorenzato would take odd construction jobs to sustain himself, which also enabled him to travel around Europe. In 1948 he returned to home country Brazil and settled down in Belo Horizonte, the town where he grew up, where he stayed until his death in 1995. 

Although he had painted since a young age it was not until 1956, when suffered from a leg injury and had to stop his decorating practice, that he dedicated himself fully to painting. In Europe he had been exposed to the new modernist currents, and he was aware of Picasso and Matisse, but his greatest heroes were the Italian Old Masters. Moreover, he had no aspirations of being part of any grander art movement and painted only what he saw in his surroundings- the working class quarters, the favela, of his hometown. He developed a unique formal language and as he mixed his pigments himself all his work had a particularly tactile surface quality. His work was first exhibited in two group shows in 1965, followed by his first solo exhibition two years later at the age of 67. Today his work is featured in several international public collections, including Fundação Clóvis Salgado, Belo Horizonte; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP); Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; and Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Brazil.