Lucas Arruda

Lucas Arruda (b. 1983, São Paulo) is a Brazilian painter who lives and works in São Paulo. He received a BFA from Faculdade Santa Marcelina, São Paulo, in 2009. His paintings address light and atmosphere through the motif of imaginary landscapes, most often a horizon between earth and sky in twilight or dawn.

His principal series, Deserto-Modelo, gathers paintings of a recurring imaginary landscape in which no specific location can be identified. The canvases are small to medium in scale, built through thin, layered applications of paint that produce a luminous density by accumulation. His monograph, with texts by Fernanda Brenner, Chris Sharp, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, was published by Éditions Cahiers d'Art in 2018. He has been represented by David Zwirner since 2018, with solo exhibitions at the gallery in London (2017), New York (2019, 2024), and Paris (2022). He is also represented by Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo.

His first large-scale institutional solo show, Deserto-Modelo, was presented at the Fridericianum in Kassel in 2019. In 2025, his paintings entered the Impressionist Gallery of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris — the institution's first monographic presentation devoted to an artist from the Southern Hemisphere — and a concurrent solo, also titled Deserto-Modelo, was presented at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes. His work is held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Pinault Collection, the Fondation Beyeler, the Moderna Museet, the Tate, and the Boros Collection, among others.