To open the heavy wooden door on rue Dauphine, walk over the courtyard, climb the old worn steps, land on the second floor…

For six decades, for generations of artists, art historians, museum curators and intellectuals from all walks of life, this path – which led to Arthur Luiz Piza’s studio – was an important part of a visit to Paris.

The works hanging on the walls of the studio’s entrance room bear witness to the friendships that were created and warmly kept here: Sergio Camargo rubs shoulders with Cruz Diez; an “Excitable” by Sérvulo Esmeraldo befriends Zao Wou-Ki, a readymade owl by Julio Villani happily blinks to Lygia Clark.

It is this place – imbued with a strong creative power, where a man with a soft voice and an unquiet look dreamt and built a singular, dense and stimulating work – that now houses the Arthur Luiz Piza Endowment Fund.

The mission of the structure, created by the artist and his wife Clelia Dente Piza, is the conservation, the safekeeping and the promotion of Piza’s work, as well as the inventory of his production – spanning over almost 70 years of a rich and abundant activity – for the production of its Catalogue Raisonné.