Lucien Murat (b. 1986, Ploemeur, France) lives and works in Paris. After a foundation year at the Atelier de Sèvres he studied fine art at Central Saint Martins in London, graduating in 2010. That same year he began sewing together the old decorative tapestries found in every French grandmother's house and painting over them, using the ready made as a way to take on the tradition directly. What he paints across them are apocalypses in fragments: flattened heroes incapable of saving anything, absurd battles, historical and contemporary references forced into uncomfortable proximity. The formative material is Warhammer, Philippe Druillet's comics and early Doom, and the narrative logic owes something to William Faulkner, with the larger story arriving only in pieces. The recent work has moved onto tarpaulin and found materials, and turns on the human treatment of the natural world, developed in part with the AI scientist Victor Rambaud, with whom he trained a program on the textures of his own earlier work.
In 2015 he received the ARTE and Beaux-Arts Magazine Prize at Slick Paris. His work has been shown in French institutions including CAC Meymac, FRAC Bordeaux, the Musée de Rochechouart, the Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète and the Musée de Soissons, and internationally in the United States, Germany, Belgium and Italy, with solo exhibitions at LKFF Art Projects in Brussels and shows with Suzanne Tarasieve in Paris.
Murat has worked with Plan X since 2022, with the solo exhibition Blazing Reality in Milan and the group exhibition The Demons Are Us in 2025, also in Milan.
