Venice, the Summer Exhibitions

Venice is ready to kick off the summer season with five truly unmissable exhibitions around the city.

MARNIE WEBER & JIM SHAW at Zuecca Projects until July 24, 2022

The Simon Lee Gallery and Zuecca Projects present Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber at the Squero Castello in Venice. The works of both artists, included in a joint exhibition, embrace a wide range of artistic media and visual imagery: from the debris of American culture to the surreal worlds of fantasy and folklore, both drawing from the subconscious as a source of artistic creativity.

Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber grew up in the booming economic landscape of post-war America. Starting in the 1970s, Shaw began to draw inspiration from American culture, finding influences in comics, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, and thrift store paintings and advertisements. Shaw’s seductive and darkly comedic works invite us to reflect on social issues and systems of economic power and subjugation.

Weber, in the 1980s, co-founded an art rock band called “Party Boys” which later inspired her to give countless art rock solo performances in the late ’80s and ’90s.

Tony Cragg. Silicon Dioxide at the Glass Museum until August 21, 2022

SILICON DIOXIDE is the new solo exhibition of TONY CRAGG at the Glass Museum of Murano (Venice) until August 21.
Tony Cragg, a glass artist, creates works that enhance the intrinsic geometries.
The exhibition layout retraces the most significant stages of Cragg’s artistic research, starting from the assemblages, historical large-scale works where small groups of objects are juxtaposed and overlapped. Then the accumulations, defined by Cragg himself as his artistic fingerprint.
Cragg’s works reflect on the complexity of physics and glass becomes one of his main sources of inspiration. The title of the exhibition, Silicon Dioxide, refers precisely to that silicon dioxide from which glass is born, containing not only a necessary chemical-organic structure but also the spark of matter ready to express itself as a new form, a new work of art.
The glass is material and at the same time living matter, lending itself over the years to various experiments, from those that see it interact in a non-subordinate manner with the landscape to those that see it as the protagonist of more intimate reflections.

AFRO 1950-1970 at Ca’ Pesaro until October 23, 2022

Ca’ Pesaro gives voice to one of the most important masters of Italian art of the post-war period, Afro Basaldella.

Afro, whose full name is Afro Libio Basaldella, studied in Florence and arrived in Venice where he graduated in 1931. He completed his artistic research in the United States, soon becoming the most well-known and appreciated Italian artist among American collectors.

Ca’ Pesaro, through the tribute to Afro, aims to deepen the relationship that developed in the 1950s between Italian and American art, characterized especially by the currents of abstract expressionism and action painting.

There are 45 masterpieces along with selected drawings and precious archival materials that retrace the crucial years of Afro’s production. The artist completes his ability to develop a always personal language, which combines the intimate assimilation of Venetian painting and tonal color with reflections on synthetic cubism and abstraction.

Rainer – Vedova: Now at the Vedova Foundation until October 30, 2022

Arnulf Rainer and Emilio Vedova are together at the Vedova Foundation until October 30. This Venetian appointment continues a dialogue that began in 2020 in Baden bei Wien at the Arnulf Rainer Museum, with the exhibition “Arnulf Rainer & Emilio Vedova: ‘Tizian schaut’.”

The Venetian master was connected to the city of Vienna, whose decadent spirit, prestigious history, and slow decline reminded him of the history of the city of Venice, which faced a similar fate a century earlier.

Rainer – Vedova is an opportunity that the Vedova Foundation wanted to seize to ideally connect Vienna and Venice through the work of two great artists. Rainer – Vedova testifies to a thoughtful and sensitive humanity that expresses, through their works, the fragility of our existence and its beauty as an entity aware of its own imperfection.

Vedova belongs to a generation of artists that was inevitably defined by the potential for malice and bloodshed during World War II and by the risks of passivity in the face of totalitarianism. For Arnulf Rainer, the focal point of his artistic research is the cross, which he sees as an abbreviation of the human face.

MARY WEATHERFORD The Flaying of Marsyas at the Palazzo Grimani Museum until November 27, 2022

The Palazzo Grimani Museum presents Mary Weatherford The Flaying of Marsyas, an exhibition of new paintings created by Mary Weatherford.

The works of The Flaying of Marsyas are inspired by the great masterpiece of the same name by Titian from 1570-76, The Punishment of Marsyas.

Mary Weatherford, always fascinated by this work, draws inspiration from the delicate palette of the Renaissance painter, paying homage to the characteristic light of Venice.

The result is a work that is more spontaneous and less violent than Titian’s but with the same allusions to fate, arrogance, and the relationship between the human and the divine.

Weatherford’s approach to painting is rooted in personal experience and evokes a variety of urban and rural environments through experimentation with light, color, structure, gesture, and the interaction between the painted surface and three-dimensional elements. In her most notable works, layers of Flashe vinyl emulsion are applied with a sponge on heavy linen panels, which are then topped with neon glass tubes, a material that Weatherford began using in 2012, inspired by old neon signs still visible in Bakersfield, California, where she was then working as a guest artist. Casting an intense light on the regular fields of color in the paintings, the tubes and their power cords often appear as hand-drawn lines.

Discover all the other museums, their collections, and ongoing and upcoming exhibitions in Venice!