Luigi Zuccheri (b. 1904, Gemona del Friuli; d. 1974, Venice) channeled the painting traditions of the Veneto and Friuli regions into still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and animal scenes that addressed the dominant presence of nature in rural Italian life. Initially trained in oil by Venetian artists Alessandro Milesi and Umberto Martina, Zuccheri began around 1940 to work with tempera, a medium associated with the Italian Old Masters, making his own pigments from stones collected from local riverbanks. In the aftermath of World War II, the artist, who was a fugitive during the violent two-year Nazi occupation of Northern Italy, began to paint humans as dwarfed by the flora and fauna native to their environment. His mature paintings depict landscapes with foregrounds occupied by anachronistically large birds, frogs, insects, marmots, rabbits, and other creatures in a characteristically subdued, earth-toned palette. Like his friend Giorgio de Chirico, with whom he shared the secrets of tempera painting, and the other Italian Metaphysical painters, Zuccheri’s theatrical compositions estrange the everyday through shifts in scale. One of the twentieth century’s great animaliers, the artist toed the line of the surreal while remaining devoted to naturalistically capturing the wonders of his region. 

Zuccheri was well-known and widely exhibited in Italy during his lifetime, including at the 1950 Venice Biennale. Posthumous solo exhibitions have been held at Karma, Los Angeles and New York (2024); STANDARD (OSLO) (2023), and in Italy at MMXX, Milan (2020); Museo Civico d’Arte, Pordenone (2014); Musei Civici di Treviso,  (2007); Museo di Montefalco,  (1982); and Galleria del Girasole, Udine (1975).