Arthur Luiz Piza

He studied painting with Antônio Gomide in São Paulo and, from 1953, printmaking with Johnny Friedlaender in Paris, where he settled. Watercolour and collage followed, and in time he turned the metal plate into relief: a surface gouged with chisel and hammer, which the paper receives as a physical mark.

“To engrave, for me, is to tear, to cut, to uproot a surface that resists. And the more it resists, the more decisive the mark left behind,” he wrote. “Each blow of the gouge is as final as the sound of an instrument.”

He showed repeatedly at the São Paulo Biennial, with awards, at the Salon de Mai and the Paris Biennial, and at the Venice Biennale in 1966. He exhibited in New York, Paris and, in Brazil, at Instituto Moreira Salles.

To engrave, for me, is to tear, to cut, to uproot a surface that resists. And the more it resists, the more decisive the mark left behind. Each blow of the gouge is as final as the sound of an instrument.