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Espace Riopelle Opens in Quebec City, Built Around a 40-Metre Farewell

Espace Riopelle, a C$84 million pavilion devoted to the painter Jean Paul Riopelle, opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec on 22 October 2026. Designed by Les Architectes FABG in steel, glass and spruce, it holds more than 130 of his works and, in a circular room on its top floor, the 40-metre Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, which he painted after the death of his companion, the American painter Joan Mitchell.

Eva Winterer

Espace Riopelle, a C$84 million pavilion devoted to the painter Jean Paul Riopelle, opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec on 22 October 2026. Designed by Les Architectes FABG in steel, glass and spruce, it holds more than 130 of his works and, in a circular room on its top floor, the 40-metre Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, which he painted after the death of his companion, the American painter Joan Mitchell.

In brief

The pavilion was designed by Les Architectes FABG, the Montreal firm that won the competition in 2022, and cost C$84 million. It stands at the centre of the museum complex, between a former prison from 1867 and a pavilion from 1933, and connects to the Pierre Lassonde Pavilion, which opened in 2016. Its steel, glass and spruce recall the Laurentian and boreal country Riopelle painted; the spruce ceilings echo his studio, and planted terraces evoke the northern landscape of L’Isle-aux-Grues. Large windows look out over the Plains of Abraham and the St Lawrence. “Riopelle did not think small,” Éric Gauthier of FABG said at the opening.

Private gifts made the building possible. Michael Audain, Yoshiko Karasawa and Pierre Lassonde gave more than 60 works by Riopelle and his contemporaries, and Audain’s contribution, including works of art, exceeds C$90 million. The Quebec government put in over C$40 million towards a budget that more than doubled after the project was first announced.

Alongside the retrospective Riopelle. The Expression of Gesture, the pavilion shows about 100 works by some 50 Quebec artists from the 1920s to the 1960s; the opening celebrations run until 25 October. In the circular room, Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg is shown with a scent composed for it by Chartier World Lab.

Jean Paul Riopelle's Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg (1992), a long, colourful painting of bird and object silhouettes, runs along the curved white wall of the circular room at the Espace Riopelle in Quebec City. Curved wooden benches stand in the foreground beneath a slatted wooden ceiling with track lights.
Jean Paul Riopelle’s Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg (1992) in its circular room at the Espace Riopelle. Photo: In Courtesy of Espace Riopelle

Why it matters

Museums are beginning to build around a single life, and the Espace Riopelle shows how far that idea can go. It places a work of grief at its highest point and surrounds it with the materials and views of the country its painter came from, so that the river, the forest and the northern light become part of how his work is seen. Milan is doing the same for Gio Ponti, its great architect, with the Spazio Gio Ponti, a room of his own inside the ADI Design Museum. For visitors, the reward is time with one person in the place that made him, and a room that asks them to stay.

Spazio Gio Ponti: Milan Finally Gives Its Architect a Home Continue · The reading Spazio Gio Ponti: Milan Finally Gives Its Architect a Home Milan is giving Gio Ponti his first room of his own, inside the museum that guards the prize he created.

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