If you are wondering what else there is to see while you are in Venice after stopping by the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, Elephant has you covered
“Rick Lowe, The Arch within the Arc” – Palazzo Grimani Museum and Gagosian
April 17–November 24, 2024 – Palazzo Grimani Museum, San Marco 63 30124 Venice
Rick Lowe’s vibrant paper collage canvases will be in conversation with the historic architecture of thePalazzo Grimani Museum in The Arch within the Arc. The works in the exhibition presented in partnership with Gagosian “balance geometric motifs and improvisational techniques. Radiating outward and turning in on themselves, Lowe’s images materialize via a process of painterly construction and deconstruction that evokes infrastructure, mapping, and the experience of moving through the city. The paintings meditate on spatial, temporal, and social relationships, in keeping with the artist’s interest in linking civic practice (such as Project Row Houses, the initiative he started in 1993) and visual expression”.
“Nebula” – Fondazione In Between Art Film
17 April – 24 November 2024 – Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Barbaria de le Tole, 6691 Venice
Continuing the Fondazione In Between Art Film’s history of showcasing diverse video works,Nebula is a group exhibition curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi featuring 8 site-specific video installations commissioned by an international collection of artists; Saodat Ismailova, Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, Diego Marcon, Basir Mahmood, Ari Benjamin Meyers, and Christian Nyampeta. “The exhibition concept is inspired by the phenomenon of fog as a material and metaphorical space where visual orientation is reduced, and different sensorial tools are required to produce and situate our understanding of what surrounds us. Within this framework, the works in Nebula embrace forms of psychological, socio-political, technological, and historical fragmentation, suggesting possible ways of navigation through a present crossed by forces that, like fog, feel like both immaterial and insurmountable.”
“Double Take” – A plus A Gallery and the School for Curatorial Studies Venice
April 16th to July 15th, 2024 – A plus A Gallery Calle Malipiero San Marco 3073 Venice
A Plus A Gallery in partnership with the School for Curatorial Studies Venice is presenting Double Take, a group exhibition curated by the school’s current cohort. Double Take, featuring works by Paolo Cirio, Jesse Darling, Simon Denny, Kasia Fudakowski, Enej Gala, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Eva & Franco Mattes, Ahmet Öğüt, Barbara Prenka is “an invitation to reconsider, to pay greater attention and care to the content hidden inside the works, to grasp their more implicit meanings. It’s an indication to see beyond the immediacy of mere visual content, to take a critical stance, to move along the boundaries of an increasingly hyperconnected and dematerialized reality”.
“Janus” Group Show – Berggruen Arts & Culture Exhibition Space
April 20th until November 24th, 2024 – Palazzo Diedo, the new Berggruen Arts & Culture, Fondamenta Diedo Cannaregio 2386 Venice
Visionary collector and philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen’s new exhibition space, and newest destination for contemporary art in Venice, Berggruen Arts & Culture is presenting Janus as its inaugural exhibition. Featuring site-specific commissions by internationally acclaimed artists Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Carsten Höller, Ibrahim Mahama, Mariko Mori, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aya Takano, Lee Ufan, and Liu Wei Janus. “The show’s title borrows its name from the Roman god Janus, often portrayed with two faces, each looking in different directions – one turned to the past and the other glimpsing into the future, evoking the show’s focus to blend the past with the contemporary.”
“Unapologetic WomXn: The Dream is the Truth” – the European Culture Center, Palazzo Bembo
April 18th-November 24th – Palazzo Bembo, San Marco 4793, 30124 VenicePresented in partnership with The European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Bembo Unapologetic WomXn: The Dream is the Truth is a group exhibition featuring works on female sexuality and societal expectations by 33 female artists. The exhibition’s focus is to “create a humane & curated space of community where artists focus on communicating how women navigate the world within the changes that occur in it constantly & the importance of their artistic practice & art not conforming to the constraints of our societies. These artists break away from traditionally male-dominated societies that still impose an idea of what a woman should be”.
“Willem de Kooning and Italy” – Gallerie dell’Accademia
April 17th until September 15th, 2024 – Gallerie dell’Accademia, Calle della Carità, 1050, 30123 Venice
The most comprehensive display of acclaimed artists in Italy Willem de Kooning and Italy will explore De Kooning’s connection to Italy and feature works created during his time in Spoleto. “The exhibition will include a selection of the large and striking “Black and White Rome” drawings de Kooning made during his first extended visit to Rome in 1959. They will be shown with works from the late 1950s, made in the years leading up to de Kooning’s first visit to Italy. Additionally, for the first time, three of de Kooning’s best-known pastoral landscapes Door to the River, A Tree in Naples, and Villa Borghese will be exhibited together. Painted in New York in 1960, the lingering memory of his trip to Italy is clear. This exhibition also includes large figurative paintings from the mid-1960s that paved the way for his interest in sculpture”.
“Are We the Aliens_” – San Francesco della Vigna
April 20th until November 24th, 2024- San Francesco della Vigna Calle S. Francesco, 2786, 30122 Venice
Are We The Aliens_ is an immersive collaboration between Belgian contemporary artist Arne Quinze and music producer and collector Swizz Beatz blending Quinzećs site-specific sculptures and soundscapes by Swizz Beatz in the 16th century San Francesco della Vigna church. “Are We the Aliens_ represents a complex, immersive, intersensory experience reexamining and questioning the role of humanity within nature. The underscore symbol in the show’s title, which is traditionally used in code and technology, invites us to question our detachment, while the central piece, the installation Sonic Levitation, generates a different sensory perspective for contemplation”.
“A wà ńbẹ̀” – The European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Mora
April 20th-November 24th – Palazzo Mora, Strada Nova, 3659, 30121 Venice
Curated by HAUSEN director Usen Esiet in partnership with The European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Mora, A wà ńbẹ̀ is a solo presentation of Orry Shenjobi’s dynamic mixed media works. “A wà ńbẹ̀ (which translates from Yoruba as “we are there”) celebrates the distinctly Nigerian Owambe (pronounced oh-waam-beh) party and its enduring cultural significance through the lens of Orry’s signature collage paintings and bricolage photographs”. Shenjobi’ will also be featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition Foreigners Everywhere curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the Giardini and Arsenale venues.
“Sarah Sze” – Victoria Miro
16 April – 16 June 2024-Calle Drio la Chiesa, 1994, 30124 Venice
Sarah Sze is an immersive solo exhibition at Victoria Miro, marks her first return to the city since representing the US in 2013 and being featured in exhibitions in 1999 and 2015. The exhibition “explores how images are constructed and memories are formed. Sze will take over the gallery with a new moving-image installation and present a suite of new paintings in surroundings that bring the mise-en-scène of Sze’s New York studio to a nearby Venetian apartment, uncannily evoking a sense that the artist has just stepped away from her place of work. Evoking a sense of discovery and indulging the pleasure of being lost rather than arriving at a destination has informed all of Sze’s oeuvre and the experience of Venice as a place, its unique invitation to wander, is echoed within the exhibition. All of the works on view incorporate imagery – even if layered and hidden – that Sze has captured or created in the city”.
“In Praise of Black Errantry” – UNIT
17 April–29 June- Palazzo Pisani S. Marina, Campiello Widmann già Biri, 6104, 30121 Venice
UNIT London’s exhibition In Praise of Black Errantry is a group show comprising 19 Afro-diasporic artists curated by Indie A. Choudhury. The title and theme of the show, Errantry is lent by Martinique-born French writer and philosopher Édouard Glissantwho stated, “Errantry is a poetics” and that it evoked a spiritual or purposeful wandering beyond national borders or the limits of exile it as. In Praise of Black Errantry “explores the poetics of errantry as an aesthetic possibility. The Afro-diasporic artists in this exhibition take up errantry as a radical strategy that defies boundaries, advocating spontaneity and experimentation beyond cultural fixity or political containment. Spanning different themes, the exhibition considers how artists have refuted conventional codes of representation or pushed against the constraints of formal rules of style, color, medium, or genre towards technical innovation, artistic evolution, and liberation.”
“Rhea Dillon” – Berggruen Arts & Culture and The Kitchen Arts & Culture Exhibition Space
April 20th until November 24th, 2024 – Palazzo Diedo, the new Berggruen Arts & Culture, Fondamenta Diedo Cannaregio 2386 Venice
Rhea Dillon A special project in partnership between Berggruen Arts & Culture and New York’s legendary avant-garde art space The Kitchen is a solo presentation of two works acting as cultural interventions in the 18th-century Palazzo Diedo. Dillon has described her practice as “playing with ‘rules of representation’ to undermine people’s myths of contemporary Western culture, referencing the power of harnessing Black people’s naturally abstracted existence, and refract[ing] embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities. In Janus *pause* leaking fortified enclaves, a sapele mahogany cross will slowly drip water onto the floor of Palazzo Diedo throughout the exhibition. The second work installed in the space is The Door of the Woman is the glass slipper (Atlas, in transit laid to rest), a 2022 sculpture that engages with the history of assemblage”.
“Ensemble” – The Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grassi
17 March 2024 to 6 January 2025 – Palazzo Grassi, Campo San Samuele 3231, Venice
Vaporetto: San Samuele, Sant’Angelo
One of the most anticipated exhibitions on view, Ensemble curated by Caroline Bourgeois chief curator of the Pinault Collection and Julie Mehretu is the largest exhibition of Julie Mehretu’s work to date in Europe with over fifty works spanning 25 years from Mehretu
Additionally, “the exhibition is punctuated by the presence of the works by some of her closest artist friends, Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin, with whom she has developed a powerful affinity over the years and with whom she has exchanged and collaborated. Organized following a principle of visual echoes, this exhibition is conceived as a free, non-chronological journey through Julie Mehretu’s work. It allows us to explore her artistic practice, to understand both how it came into being and how it is constantly renewed. Their works inspire her and resonate with her own, with her way of looking at the world—all the more since each of these artists, like Julie Mehretu herself, experienced displacements that deeply shaped who they became, by force or by choice, leaving or fleeing Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan. Their participation in the exhibition is a testament to Julie Mehretu’s acute attention to these gradually woven relationships, to their seminal role and creative power.”
Written by Amber Smith
