Strong impact

Venice’s impact during the period of its Biennale is inimitable. These days the 60-year-old art showcase attracts visitors in such large numbers over the course of its vernissage that all the various strata of the art world now want to join the party (see Venice Biennale (1)). Galleries, collectors, artists, even certain States that didn’t used to participate in the event are now staging exhibitions in little houses, large churches and palaces. We count no less than 82 collateral events – clearly we weren’t able to visit them all.

The Holy See Pavilion

But by all accounts this year the most astonishing show is staged at the request of the Holy See in conjunction with Bruno Racine, who oversees the Pinault collection in Venice, and Chiara Parisi, head of the Centre Pompidou Metz. The pair have curated a show that brings together 10 artists in a women’s prison in the Giudecca district of Venice. This is the largest penitentiary of its kind in Italy with 82 detainees.

Maurizio Cattelan

Outside the institution we are met with a mural painting by Maurizio Cattelan. Two feet are seen from below as though we are looking at a dead body, which apparently references a famous painting by Mantegna, “The Lamentation of Christ”, but which also strangely resembles the photographs of feet holding the barrel of a gun by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat. More than just the artworks, it is the experience of the visit that is striking in as much as it is led by three of the detainees.

Visit of the Pope

They look like everyday women, wearing make up and jewellery. They are very involved in this unprecedented venture, for example telling the story of the site itself which in the 19^th century was a refuge for former prostitutes. But what is the moral significance of this exhibit that could lead it to justify an official Papal representation as part of this contemporary art festival? – The Pope will incidentally be making a special visit to Venice on 28 April –. Chiara Parisi responds: “We step into the shoes of someone coming to visit a family member in prison. We leave all our belongings outside, including phones, in the control of law enforcement. This is where we understand the dignity of these incredible women.”

Réservation : Tel. +39 06 39967444

 

Berggruen’s Palazzo Diedo

On the subject of philanthropy in Venice, in another genre entirely, it is worth looking to the case of the American billionaire Nicolas Berggruen who has opened, during the course of the Biennale, in the district of Cannaregio, his Palazzo Diedo, the European branch of an art and culture foundation that bears his name and seeks to anticipate the future in terms of issues as diverse as wealth distribution and global warming.

Urs Fischer, Lee Ufan

Jointly they have asked several artists, such as the Swiss  who lives in the United States, Urs Fischer (See here and here an interview of Fischer), and the Korean who lives in Japan, Lee Ufan (See here and here an interview of Lee), to conceive works in situ and in particular to decorate the ceilings. A beautiful show in progress, that marries current art and old decor, making it even more impactful.

https://berggruenarts.org/

 

Zeng Fanzhi

In the same area, the most spectacular exhibition from the off-site part of the Venice Biennale is staged by Michael Govan, head of Lacma in Los Angeles (See here an interview of Govan), in a majestic former ecclesiastical building, the Scuola Grande della Misericordia. Here, in a setting designed by architect Tadao Ando, the Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi (born in 1964) is displaying his new work, paintings made using a fascinating and mysterious technique.

Like Giovanni Segantini

Sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, they are made up of a multitude of coloured dots, thickly textured as though the painter was a direct heir to the post-impressionists like French artist Georges Seurat ((1859-1891) or the Swiss-born Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899). But first and foremost Zeng Fanzhi has invented a technique to create drawings that are half-way between the Chinese tradition and the European Renaissance. To do this he has developed a special paper that absorbs brown ink and allows marks to appear, which Zeng then uses to construct a shape. “It takes me six months to make a drawing,” he says.

https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/zeng-fanzhi-near-and-farnow-and-then

 

James Lee Byars and Seung-Taek Lee

In the library at Venice’s Academy of Sciences, the Michael Werner gallery has installed a dialogue between two artists. They were born in the same year but at opposite ends of the earth, the American James Lee Byars (1932-1997) and the Korean Seung-Taek Lee (1932). Byars, however, spent ten important years living in Japan. They both have an unclassifiable style, to the point that in the exhibition we don’t always understand who did what.

Mystical atmosphere

But we allow ourselves be swept away by a quasi-mystical atmosphere of a metaphysical cabinet of curiosities. “It is this taste for the immaterial which unites them,” emphasizes the curator Allegra Pesanti. An entire room is dedicated to a coffin that is completely covered in gold fabric, overlooked by a large Venetian chandelier. Byars was obsessed with his own death, which he had imagined as a great performance.

https://www.michaelwerner.com/viewing-room/invisible-questions-that-fill-the-air-james-lee-byars-and-seung-taek-lee3#tab:thumbnails

 

Peter Hujar

American photographer Peter Hujar (1934-1987) became legendary for his homoerotic scenes and his portraits of dogs, and was also obsessed with death. At the Santa Maria della Pieta institute, the foundation named after him is exhibiting prints that he chose to compose the only monograph published during his lifetime.

Palermo portraits of dead children

And curiously, added to his portraits of Bob Wilson and Susan Sontag, “figures who had fought to be themselves and who he tried to capture with some truth,” according to curator Grace Deveney, he has presented a series of snapshots made a decade earlier, depicting in the catacombs of Palermo portraits of dead children dressed as though they were living and presented under glass.

https://www.peterhujarvenice.com/

 

William Kentridge

Lastly, and much more joyfully, right by the Biennale’s Giardini the superstar of South African art and specialist in black and white animations, William Kentridge has designed the ground floor of a little house as a “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot”(See here an other interview of William Kentridge). The show is directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (See here an other interview of  Christov-Bakargiev). “The coffee-pots series started four years ago during Covid. I was shut away in the studio for several months and I made nine autobiographical films. Coffee is the ordinary, it’s everyday life.” In Kentridge’s work it takes a burlesque turn in a cheering cacophony.

Also in Venice:

-Pierre Huyghe at Punta della Dogana (See here the report about the show)

-Julie Mehretu at the Palazzo Grassi. (Soon a report about the show)

https://www.pinaultcollection.com/palazzograssi/fr/julie-mehretu-ensemble

 

-Willem de Kooning and Italy:

https://gallerieaccademia.it/en/willem-de-kooning-e-litalia-en

 

-Ernest Pignon Ernest at the Louis Vuitton Venezia space (https://www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr/fr/evenements/ernest-pignon-ernest-je-est-un-autre)

 

 

 

 

 

---