Richard Peduzzi’s Designs Make Space the Protagonist

Stage space takes the leading role in Vertige, an exhibition of Richard Peduzzi’s work at Musée d’Orsay through 17 January 2027. Drawings, notebooks, models and architectural material show how a designer can direct an audience’s attention before a singer enters or a line is spoken. The display builds on Peduzzi’s long presence in the museum, where monumental models have occupied its central nave.

One model depicts the Palais Garnier and the surrounding city. Such work reveals Peduzzi’s interest in structures that operate at more than one scale: a wall can define a stage picture, suggest a building and carry the emotional force of an entire scene. His collaborations with director Patrice Chéreau brought that thinking into productions including Lulu, Wozzeck and From the House of the Dead.

The exhibition invites viewers to look at decisions usually absorbed in the flow of performance. A tower can make a figure seem vulnerable; a façade can imply authority; an opening can control when another world becomes visible. These are not neutral backgrounds. They help tell a story, direct movement and create expectations about what kind of action can occur.

Peduzzi also selected works from the museum’s collections that speak to his own practice. Placing those objects beside theatre material makes the display a conversation about artistic influences rather than a simple career chronology. Visitors need not have seen the original productions to understand the central question of how imagined environments acquire dramatic meaning.

Sets are temporary by nature, and many survive only through drawings, models or memory. Bringing those traces into a museum changes their scale of attention. Vertige lets the audience pause over work that, onstage, is designed to disappear into the performance while shaping every moment of it.