D CONTEMPORARY
21 October 2026
Acquisitions
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NEWS ⮕
Cedars-Sinai acquires Arcadia by Rômulo Avi and commissions a new painting for its London clinic
The healthcare institution has acquired the painting Arcadia and commissioned a new work by the Brazilian artist, represented by D Contemporary, for its London location at New Cavendish Street
Arcadia
Oil on board
160 × 120 cm
2023
London, 29 September 2026 — Cedars-Sinai has acquired Arcadia, a painting by Rômulo Avi, and has commissioned a new work by the artist. Both paintings are for the institution's London location at New Cavendish Street. Avi is represented by D Contemporary.
The acquisitions continue a practice of collecting that Cedars-Sinai has maintained since the 1970s, when the Los Angeles collectors Frederick R. Weisman and Marcia Simon Weisman began placing modern and contemporary art throughout the medical center's buildings.
Rômulo Avi
Rômulo Avi (b. 1992, Sorocaba, Brazil) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in London and São Paulo. He completed an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2022, following the Advanced Drawing and Painting Programme at the Florence Academy of Art in 2020 and a BA in Architecture and Urban Planning at PUC-Campinas in 2017.
His practice is grounded in material experimentation as a means of thinking through image-making, memory and transformation, evoking imagined landscapes and emotional states shaped by ongoing research in philosophy, myth and literature. Through a layered process of brushing, sanding, digging, coating and erasure, Avi treats the surface as an active site of negotiation, where forms are continuously revealed, obscured and reconfigured. Each work emerges through a dialogue between intention and contingency, and the act of making remains responsive to the material's own agency.
Representation in his practice functions less as depiction than as orientation. Figures and motifs are distilled toward archetypal forms that act as navigational markers within transitional landscapes, resisting fixed meaning and offering instead a contemplative field in which symbolism is diluted, reconfigured and reactivated.
His work is held in the Cedars-Sinai Collection and in private collections in London and internationally. He was awarded the Artiq Creative Careers Prize in 2025 and the City & Guilds of London Art School Prize for Outstanding Critical Engagement in 2022.
“Rômulo Avi's paintings have an immanent aura that speaks to his intuitive approach to image creation. His works emerge through a layered and responsive process, rather than from an observed or predetermined subject. Paint is scratched, spread and abraded on board, his chosen support, while colours abut, lick and meld into each other in rich and complex images that reward slow looking. So far, his references seem to point to literature, myth, psychology, Arcadian traditions, and it will be interesting to see how his practice progresses from here. In the few short years since graduating it has kept developing in complexity and sophistication, it will be very exciting to see what comes next.”
Andrea Tarsia, ART CONSULTANT
