Contemporary exhibition

Lucas Arruda

From April 08th to July 20th, 2025
Lucas Arruda
Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023
© Photo: Everton Ballardin © Lucas Arruda Courtesy de l’artiste, David Zwirner et Mendes Wood DM
On the occasion of the 2024 France-Brazil season, the Musée d’Orsay’s Impressionist Gallery will be hosting an exhibition focusing on the Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda, born in 1983. The artist’s works was also the subject of a rapprochement with one of Monet’s works at the Beyeler Foundation in June 2022, but this is the first time that an exhibition will be really engaging their paintings in dialogue.

The exhibition will take up nine walls and will be largely composed of small canvases from the Deserto-Modelo (Models of Desert) series: imaginary landscapes, inner visions painted from memory in the study. Lucas Arruda’s paintings are never created “sur le motif” or based on photographs, but are always mnemonic reconstructions close to abstraction. Like the impressionists, however, the question of light and discernable projection of a form of introspection is particularly perceptible in them. As the artist wrote, “Light is at the centre of my work. It is movement. It is light that guides my painting, which creates intensity and finishes by creating spaces that are neither abstract nor figurative”. Although small in size, Lucas Arruda’s paintings are imbued with dramatic tension, and it is clear that each brushstroke is decisive, paradoxically monumental given the scale of the canvas.

This presentation extends the dynamics of previous contemporary exhibitions, by exploring the role that the Musée d’Orsay plays as an emblematic reference for living painters in France and across the world, as well as by extending “the polyphony of Orsay” so dear to Michel Laclotte to emblematic figures in contemporary creation who had not previously been presented at Orsay. This will be the
institution’s very first monographic presentation of an artist from the southern hemisphere.

For the first time for a contemporary project implemented by the Musée d’Orsay, the exhibition will be echoed by a simultaneous monographic presentation at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, at which Lucas Arruda’s multimedia works will be presented complementarily.

  1. Monday Closed
  2. Tuesday 9.30am - 6.00pm
  3. Wednesday 9.30am - 6.00pm
  4. Thursday 9.30am - 9.45pm
  5. Friday 9.30am - 6.00pm
  6. Saturday 9.30am - 6.00pm
  7. Sunday 9.30am - 6.00pm
Musée d'Orsay
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
75007 Paris
Map & itinerary
Tarifs
Time slot full rate
€16
Time slot reduced rate
€13
Enfant & Cie
€13
Nocturne rate
€12
-18 year olds, -26 year old residents of the EEA
Free