LUMA Arles

Overpainted Photographs

Gerhard Richter

Until January 10, 2027

Gerhard Richter is widely regarded as one of the most important artists of our time. Across more than six decades, his work has profoundly shaped contemporary art by challenging the boundaries between painting, photography, abstraction, and figuration.

 

Overpainted Photographs is a major body of work within his exceptional career. In these small-format works, Richter takes ordinary photographic snapshots and intervenes on them directly with oil paint. The result is neither a simple photograph nor a painting, but an image suspended between the two.

 

By adding paint to the surface, Richter disrupts the photograph’s apparent clarity and certainty. Parts of the image remain visible, while others are covered, blurred, or transformed by gesture and color. What might first appear to be a record of reality becomes something less fixed and more open: a space where memory, perception, and meaning are constantly shifting.

 

These works reflect central questions that run throughout Richter’s practice, including the instability of images, the limits of representation, and the uncertain relation between seeing and knowing. Closely connected to his larger paintings, the Overpainted Photographs show how abstraction can emerge from everyday images and reveal the lasting power of Richter’s art to question how we see, remember, and believe images.

 

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Correspondences

Soundwalk Collective & Patti Smith

From July 4 until November 8 2026

CORRESPONDENCES is an immersive exhibition bringing together the full body of audiovisual works created through the long-term collaboration between Soundwalk Collective, led by artist Stephan Crasneanscki with producer Simone Merli, and writer, artist and performer Patti Smith. Arising from over a decade of conversations, the project combines sound, still and moving images, poetry, archival material, and installations to explore how landscapes hold memory, conflict, and transformation.

 

At its core are field recordings gathered in some of the planet’s most fragile and resonant environments, from melting glaciers and deserts to forests, wetlands and contaminated areas. Interwoven with archival and original footage, together with Patti Smith’s poetic responses, these sonic environments trace connections between artistic creation, scientific imagination, political struggle, and ecological vulnerability.

 

Newly commissioned works turn to the Camargue, a territory shaped by water, myth, environmental change, and human presence. CORRESPONDENCES proposes a space of heightened attention and listening, where distant geographies and submerged histories reverberate in the present.

 

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Bodies Never Lie

Stan Douglas

From July 4, 2026, until January 10, 2027

For more than four decades, Stan Douglas has expanded the languages of photography, film, and video through works that revisit historical events, musical forms, and cultural narratives with extraordinary formal precision. His practice examines moments of rupture, transition, and contested memory, asking how images, sounds, and bodies carry the unfinished tensions of history.

 

For Bodies Never Lie, LUMA Arles has commissioned Exquisite Corpse, a new multi channel video and sound installation set in 1950s Francoist Spain, when flamenco was being suppressed, standardized, and recast as a symbol of nationalist culture. Filmed in 2026, the work stages three informal flamenco sessions in front of caves, workers’ homes, and on the site of an olive mill in Andalusia. Its structure evokes the Surrealist game of the exquisite corpse, creating a collective body through fragmented contributions.

 

The exhibition places this new commission in dialogue with key film installations and photographic series, tracing Douglas’s sustained engagement with performance, politics, and the unstable relationship between history, memory and representation.

 

This exhibition is part of the “Arles Associé” sequence of the Rencontres d’Arles.

 

 

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Informations

 

Address: 35 avenue Victor Hugo, 13200 Arles