Lucrecia Zappi

Higher Bodies

Opening April 12th, 2026

36 NE 54th Street, Miami, FL 33137 Gallery Hours: Tuesdays, Thursdays & Saturdays, 11 AM – 5 PM (and by appointment)

Lucrecia Zappi presents her first solo exhibition, a group of gestural paintings centered on flesh, stage, and displacement. Born in Buenos Aires, raised in São Paulo, and based in New York, she brings a transnational sensibility to canvases that operate as arenas where the body endures and shifts.

Between spectacle and vulnerability, figures emerge exposed, only to recede again. The space at times becomes a stage - at once monumental and devotional - where the figure is both subject and witness. Her language, visceral and restrained, unfolds across surfaces slathered with metallic silver that glints like armor, recalling Moorish architectural elements as they appear in Brazilian vernacular - structures that filter vision and light. Mirrors echo nature itself, doubling and dispersing it, so that perception becomes multiplied and alive.

A central diptych inspired by Hansel and Gretel reimagines the tale through an innocent lens, inflected with Freudian undertones. It conjures a dreamlike realm, a passage marked by fantasy, uncanny disorientation, and the pursuit of a better place. The journey reads as initiation - a movement toward the unknown that hovers between myth and, in a contemporary register, a crossing.

At the core of her work lies what the artist calls “sulfate,” a residue of endurance. The paintings feel weathered, abraded, as if shaped by constant retelling. Within these layers, Lucrecia’s parallel life as a novelist surfaces in inscriptions that echo the work’s chromatic intensity. Her canvases hold fragments where narrative is embedded, interrupted, and rewritten, moving closer to rhythm than to overt speech.

In this debut exhibition, wonder and unease coexist. Migration expands into myth. And the body, whether human or feral, remains in a constant state of flux.

Lucrecia Zappi was born in Argentina and grew up in Brazil. Last year she showed her work in two group exhibitions at CENTRAL FINE and participated at a group presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025.

She’s an awarded novelist, with three published novels in several countries and with a career in visual arts journalism, writing mostly for the major Brazilian newspaper “Folha de S. Paulo."