On a Tuesday afternoon in midsummer, the French artist and scenographer Richard Peduzzi walks into the petite Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens dressed in pressed chinos and a white made-to-measure button-down. At 83, he still has a full head of hair, greying only at his sideburns. He surveys the stage, pauses, and says: “It’s a catastrophe,” staring at the large, draped mound of blue fabric that sits, volcano-like, in the centre of the stage.
It’s a set for Samuel Beckett’s absurdist drama Happy Days. The “mound” will bury the play’s protagonist, Winnie – first up to her waist, later to her neck – but Peduzzi is not happy with the form. It’s too flat on top, and there is an issue with the architecture underneath. The colour, however, is spot on. “This blue is the story of infinity, space, night and dreams, but also of confinement,” he says.
Peduzzi is one of Europe’s most celebrated scenographers, best known for his productions with award-winning directors Patrice Chéreau and Luc Bondy. His 58-year career spans monumental stage sets for countless operas – Strauss’s Elektra, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers – and, more recently, fashion shows. He collaborated with Chanel on both the brand’s AW26 collection, which featured towering crayon-coloured cranes, and its Métiers d’Art 2026 presentation in a disused New York subway. According to the brand’s artistic director, Matthieu Blazy, Peduzzi is “legendary”.
“Richard has revolutionised the practice of scenography, elevating it to a true art form,” he says. “It was after listening to a podcast with him that I immediately felt a strong connection. I was struck by his words, by his sensitivity and sense of emotion, and by the subtlety he always brings to his work, despite the grandeur of his set designs.”
But the full arc of Peduzzi’s output also includes paintings, furniture and interior design – much of which will be spotlit across three Paris exhibitions this autumn. The first, opening at the Musée d’Orsay on 6 October, is Vertige: a solo show that pairs a large-scale architectural model, made by Peduzzi for the museum’s inauguration 40 years ago, with 31 of his set-design “studies”. The artworks, in oil, gouache and watercolour, reveal an essential part of his process: his imaginings for “truly exceptional productions that have rightly gone down in history”, says Clémence Raynaud, general curator of architecture at the Musée d’Orsay and one of the exhibition’s curators. But they are also beautiful images in their own right: metaphorical architecture featuring recurring motifs such as archways, columns and blocks, cast in a misty palette of midnight blues and blacks, and sometimes a flash of vivid red.
Next up is a group show at the Opéra Garnier library; opening this month, it includes three paintings of Peduzzi’s set design for Richard Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, which premiered at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1976. In November, Galerie RX will dedicate its Marais space to new work: paintings, tapestries, sculpture and furniture.
In almost all his creative outlets, Peduzzi has wrestled with themes of confinement and escape. “There’s always the idea of the box,” he says. “I like the line that Faulkner wrote: ‘His own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.’” In his 2014 book Là-bas, c’est dehors (Over there is outside), Peduzzi writes that since his early childhood in Normandy, he has been searching for an exit door.
After the second world war, his mother was imprisoned and his father deported to Germany – he was part of the Resistance and, in his absence, she, a vulnerable 18-year-old, was linked to a German officer (but was later pardoned). Peduzzi was raised between the homes of his maternal and paternal grandparents. “I was sort of carted around,” he says, adding that his memories of the time have indelibly shaped his visual universe. The war-torn port of Le Havre “was dark, but it was fascinating”. Of visiting his mother in prison, around the age of five, he still recalls the sprawling corridors, a labyrinth of high, featureless walls. He writes: “Ever since then I have felt cramped wherever I am, haunted by the feeling of being stuck in a dead end, trapped.”
Peduzzi’s mother was released from prison when he was a teenager, “but we never had much of a relationship”, he says. It was his father (though never very present either) who introduced him to drawing. At the age of 15, he moved to Paris to live with his paternal aunt; he studied for two years under sculptor Charles Auffret and worked for a time at an industrial design firm.
In 1968, at the age of 25, he met the young theatre director Chéreau through costume designer Jacques Schmidt. The connection was instant. “We talked about literature, books, painting,” recalls Peduzzi. “And the story has lasted 50 years.” They staged shows across Europe, covering Shakespeare, Molière, Neruda and Mozart. Their most notorious outing was Der Ring des Nibelungen, which outraged audiences for reframing the timeless mythical saga as an allegory for 19th-century capitalism – Peduzzi’s scenography included a 20th-century hydroelectric dam. Yet the final cycle of the performance in 1980 received a one-hour standing ovation. For Peduzzi, his sets are living entities. “I always say that a stage set is an actor – it must accompany, dream, precede, move with the other actors,” he says. “It should be a fully fledged character, in its own right.”
At Peduzzi’s atelier in the ninth arrondissement, the long, light-filled space is crammed full of books, paintings and wooden maquettes – meticulous constructions of theatre sets and doll-house-sized furniture. He and his wife, photographer Pénélope Chauvelot, have lived in an apartment above since the late ’90s. Long before that, “Charles Dullin [the French theatre director] lived here and would organise get-togethers with Sartre and Camus”, says Peduzzi. “It’s where Camus met María Casares.” At the home’s centre is a striking rotunda-style room painted a deep turquoise: a sculptural wooden rocking chair is his own design, as is a colourful geometric vase – both part of a 100-piece collection commissioned by Paris’s Mobilier National between 1988 and 2013.
“Richard never really changes his approach, whether he’s working on a stage set or a chair or a painting,” says Hervé Lemoine, president of the Manufactures Nationales, who worked with Peduzzi on a retrospective dedicated to his furniture in 2024. “He is a man of space, first of all. The one question he keeps asking himself is: how much can you leave out, and still say something.”
In his ninth decade, Peduzzi remains busy. “My father is always working,” says his daughter Antonine, who co-founded and runs the fashion label TL 180. “For him, a holiday is a nightmare. If he stops, he gets anxiety. His work is his way of surviving.” His son Nicolas, a film director who is currently working on a documentary about his father, adds: “Even now, he is always drawing, on everything – in a restaurant he would draw on the napkin. It’s a compulsion.”
Currently, he is immersed in painting. A new series of canvases have a dreamlike quality; the same themes appear, but he looks at them with new eyes, he says. “There is a sense that things appear, disappear and come back again.” After taking on only a handful of theatre gigs in the past decade, he is also thrilled to be working on a stage design again – as well as the Beckett play, he is involved with a production of Così fan tutte showing in Vienna next year. “After [I stopped working with] Patrice Chéreau and Luc Bondy, I didn’t feel like doing any more theatre,” he says. “Now I think we can be reborn.”