LUCAS ARRUDA

Early Years

Lucas Arruda was born in 1983 in São Paulo. He painted every day as a child—speaking in 2017, he said: “I was quite a hyperactive child, so my parents enrolled me in an art school for children where I experimented with different media.” When he enrolled in Faculdade Santa Marcelina art college in São Paulo, painting was not fashionable, but he and his contemporaries “reclaimed” the practice. He graduated with a BFA in 2009.

Lucas Arruda: Artworks

Arruda’s artistic practice balances colour and light to suggest faint horizons, luminosity and a vastness of landscape. He often establishes the horizon line first, working instinctively to fuse sky and sea and to establish a temporal relationship between the viewer and the painting. He frequently works in small formats—“The space I’m suggesting inside the canvas wants to be bigger than the edges,” he said in 2025, talking about creating a “sense of intimacy about paintings that want to be bigger than the limits of the canvas”.

• The majority of Lucas Arruda’s artworks, whether depicting the jungle, landscape, seascape or abstraction, are titled Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series). However, the words “landscape” and “seascape” are disputed by Arruda—he famously said in a 2017 interview: “The only reason to call my works landscapes is cultural: it’s simply that viewers automatically register my format as a landscape, although none of the images can be traced to a geographic location. It’s the idea of landscape as a structure, rather than a real place.” The repetition of the title underlines the continuity and connectedness of Aruda’s artistic practice.

Talking about the idea of desert, Arruda said in 2015: “In a desert you don’t know if it’s the start or the end of the world. It’s a place man can’t survive, an empty place, not anything, a metaphysical place, because you have no presence of time, but an existential quality. For me, it’s the only place where you could have freedom, an experience of death as an experience of freedom, and then return home safely.”

• Arruda has also produced images on 35mm transparencies (slides). Inspired by an art teacher using a slide projector, he became interested in the idea of light coming from the back of the image. Projecting the painted transparencies creates a different relationship between viewer and artwork than looking at a painted canvas. In addition, working on such a small scale meant that Arruda left more of the finished image to chance because it wasn’t always easy for him to see what he was doing.

Lucas Arruda: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo, Winsing Art Place, Taipei (2026)
• Lucas Arruda: Eclipse, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2025)
• Lucas Arruda: Qu’importe le paysage, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2025)
• Lucas Arruda: Assum Preto, David Zwirner, New York City (2024)
• Lucas Arruda: Lugar sem Lugar, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre (2021) (and touring)
• Lucas Arruda, New Century Art Foundation | Pond Society, Shanghai (2020)
• Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo, David Zwirner, New York City (2019)
• Lucas Arruda‚ Neutral Corner, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2018)
• Lucas Arruda, David Zwirner, London (2017)
• Lucas Arruda: Desert Model, Frederic Snitzer, Miami (2012)
• Lucas Arruda: III Mostra do Programa de Exposições, Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo (2011)
• Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo, 713 Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires (2010) (and touring)
• Lucas Arruda: Obras Recentes, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2010)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Affirmation Room, Mendes Wood DM, New York City (2026)
• The New Vision: Monet and the Contemporary Gaze, Pola Museum of Art, Hakone (2026)
• Collected with Vision. Private Collections in Dialogue with the Old Masters, Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (2025)
• Fukei-Ga (Landscape Painting), Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2024)
• Honey, I Rearranged the Collection, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024)
• I See No Difference Between a Handshake and a Poem, Mendes Wood DM, Paris (2023)
• Seismic Movements, Dhaka Art Summit (2020)
• David Zwirner: 25 Years, David Zwirner, New York City (2018)
• Cry of Liberty, 1st International Biennale of Asunción, Asunción (2015)
• Os Primeiros 10 Anos, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2012)
• De Passagem, Rhys Mendes, São Paulo (2009)
• 40º Salão de Arte Contemporânea de Piracicaba (2008)

Further Reading

• Lucas Arruda’s Instagram
• Artist profile page at David Zwirner
• Artist profile page at Mendes Wood DM
• 2017 interview from Studio International
• 2025 interview from Art Basel
• 2025 conversation with Lucas Arruda
• 2025 interview in Numéro

Lucas Arruda FAQs

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