Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Venice

From March 26th to October 12th, the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia will host the exhibition Genoma y estructura escultórica by Park Eun Sun. Following the great success of the exhibition projects dedicated to Igor Mitoraj in 2022 and Pablo Atchugarry in 2024, the prestigious cultural centre continues its program with a show dedicated to the Korean master. The project presents a selection of the artist's monumental sculptures and offers a reflection on the relationship between sculptural form, scientific structure, and perception of space. These reflections are synthesised in modular structures, serpentine patterns and double helix configurations, which refer to processes of growth, interaction and transformation. The exhibition setting fosters an ongoing dialogue between Park Eun Sun's works and the architectural complex designed by Santiago Calatrava that hosts them.

Following the great success of the exhibition projects dedicated to Igor Mitoraj in 2022 and Pablo Atchugarry in 2024, the prestigious cultural centre continues its program with a show dedicated to the Korean master, the exhibition Genoma y Estructura Escultórica is curated by Kosme de Barañano. The project presents a selection of the artist's monumental sculptures and offers a reflection on the relationship between sculptural form, scientific structure, and perception of space. These reflections are synthesised in modular structures, serpentine patterns and double helix configurations, which refer to processes of growth, interaction and transformation. The exhibition setting fosters an ongoing dialogue between Park Eun Sun's works and the architectural complex designed by Santiago Calatrava that hosts them.

We are happy to announce the participation of Lilla Tabasso and Václav Cigler in the Presentation of Fondazione Dries Van Noten: The Only True Protest is Beauty. The Presentation stands as a journey into beauty understood not as resolution but as tension, an intensity that unsettles the familiar and opens space for the unexpected. With a title inspired by the words of singer and activist Phil Ochs, the Presentation invites us to consider beauty not as simple prettiness but as a form of inquiry and a catalyst for reflection, provocation, and transformation. Set within Palazzo Pisani Moretta, more than two hundred works spanning fashion, jewellery, design, art, photography, glass, ceramics, and material experimentation enter into dialogue with frescoes, ceilings, and the building’s layered histories. Selected pieces from established fashion houses’ archives are presented together with contemporary textile pieces, underscoring an enduring role as medium of cultural expression and affirming its capacity to generate critical and poetic statements. Collectible art and design objects coexist with experimental works – together forging new directions in sensorial storytelling and material exploration. Moreover, Traditional craftsmanship is showcased alongside innovative international voices, reflecting the Fondazione’s commitment to both safeguarding heritage and nurturing new talents and views. Curated by Dries Van Noten, the presentation unfolds as a constellation of affinities and contrasts, where mastery meets discovery and craftsmanship becomes a language of emotion.

curated by the School for Curatorial Studies Venice. A three-day barter market, where money is completely banned and replaced by objects, time and skills. These will be the only forms of exchange accepted to obtain the works exhibited by the artists, who are the project’s main focus. The event, conceived in January 2020 before the pandemic, excludes the use of any currency to make evident what became clear to many of us during the months of the lockdown: the true essence of our economies

Origin as an idea manifests on a multitude of levels, in an attempt to bring a structure from the past to a space of contemporaneity. This transition becomes as a scaffold for the future-casting nature of origin stories, while creating a large volume of literary output. These stories and myths exist globally and set-up the

The Contini Art Gallery is pleased to present, at Bagno Alpemare, “Alpemare 10th Anniversary: Art Collection,” a curated selection of works by various artists celebrating the tenth anniversary of the historic beach owned by the Bocelli family. Curated by Alberto Bartalini and held under the patronage of the Municipality of Forte dei Marmi, the exhibition will remain open until September 2026. The Bocelli family has created a unique meeting place where art, landscape, and hospitality converge. Through its collaboration with the Contini Art Gallery, a distinctive and firmly established tradition has emerged, whereby each summer sculptures by internationally renowned artists are thoughtfully set in dialogue with this unique and highly refined setting. To mark this milestone, this year’s exhibition takes on a new form, a collection of works bringing together the leading artists featured in past Alpemare exhibitions, including Igor Mitoraj, Manolo Valdés, Pablo Atchugarry, Park Eun Sun, and Mario Arlati. The exhibition thus unfolds as a visual atlas, a constellation of works that evoke encounters, spatial transformations, and the ongoing dialogue between contemporary art and landscape. It is a celebration not only of an anniversary, but also of a cultural project that, over time, has shaped a shared vision and enriched the identity of Versilia.

In Bloom - Art & Botany will be next year’s major summer season exhibition, and in it, the unique interplay between flowers and art will be brought into focus in its own right. The exhibition will include works and objects in a variety of media and techniques – including paintings, prints, drawings, illustrated books, sculpture, textile art, installations, photography, film, crafts and design from the 16th century to the present day.

This exhibition brings together sculptures, works on paper, and the large embroidered NEST (2004), spanning Paul Noble’s career and his sustained engagement with one of Britain’s defining artistic legacies: Henry Moore. Venice is not an incidental setting. In 1948, Moore was awarded the International Prize for Sculpture at the 24th Venice Biennale, where his work was recognised as embodying the humanist values of modernism. Showing Noble’s work at Caterina Tognon—a gallery whose programme is rooted in material craft and process— places this engagement in the very city where that recognition occurred. The exhibition title takes its name from a deliberate misreading. Where Moore placed monumental reclining figures across the world’s piazzas and landscapes, Noble proposes declining figures: forms that slump, accumulate, stack, and compost—his contention that humans, despite behaving as though they sit at the top of the food chain are, in fact, principally responsible for damaging the natural world. Noble's engagement with Moore began in 1996 with scepticism. His issue was less with Moore himself than what he represented: the top-down imposition of public art into communities who had no say in its arrival. Critical too of the scale and industrial processes behind the works, and what he perceived as their adherence to pre-war ideals of the nuclear family, Noble recasts this utopian myth through humour and reworking. The first building in Nobson Newtown (1996-)—Noble’s fictional dystopian city—depicts an architect’s house built on sand, with a pile of discarded Moore sculptures beside it. Drawn entirely in pencil, the project functions as both town plan and self-portrait. Returning to this image years later, Noble created Monument Monument (2007), a large meticulous pencil drawing made from every sculpture in Moore’s six-volume catalogue raisonné, each work re-sized to the same scale, assembled as a single towering form. Drawing Moore from the ground up, sculpture by sculpture, Noble found himself recognising, over time, his foil as a master of form, material and scale. In 2019 he said in an interview: “ I began, at the foot of the mountain, still a critic of Moore but as I slowly ascended I recognised what a master of form and material and scale he was. It took me a while to get to this point and be rid of my prejudices. ” (from: A Cartography of the Self, Interview with Kristen Knupp, Art Vista / Art Decision Magazine, December 2019) The works in this exhibition span nearly three decades of this evolving dialogue. Exhibited widely, the scatological ceramic figures of the mid-2000s play with scale. Formed in variations from ten modular Moore’s—inspired by Chinese scholar stones they were conceived as ornaments for Paul’s Palace the intricately detailed seaside villa that takes centre stage in Nobson. Exhibited here for the first time, The HM’s, mounted on travertine bases: pale, knotted, interlocking forms operate simultaneously as homage and parody. Intricate pencil drawings such as Sixteen Henry Moore Sculptures On Top Of Each Other (2005–2025), subvert Moore’s canonical forms. Compressed into an absurdist monument—Noble recalls Moore’s contemporary Hans Bellmer whose radical dismemberment of the human form stands as modernism’s counterpoint to Moore's idealism. Moore worked within a tradition that placed the body at the centre of meaning—dignified, enduring, and at ease in the landscape. Noble’s Declining Figure drawings (2017), also shown here for the first time, revisit this familiar motif of the reclining figure set against sea and sky. "Declining" rather than "reclining", these forms suggest something getting smaller, deteriorating, and less certain. NEST (2004), modelled on traditional East Asian folding screens, anchors the exhibition. Combining embroidery, appliqué, marquetry, and beadwork, it presents a world of egg-carton buildings and a wool nest enveloping a tiny egg cradled on a dead tree: a landscape caught between formation and collapse. Birth, waste, death, repeat. Its intensely handmade surface stands in direct contrast to the industrial processes associated with monumental sculpture.

Throughout (Duignan) is on a spiritual quest, cracking open his Catholic heritage into painterly fragments and invented images Paterson & the Mills INDUSTRY & CREATIVITY Fred Duignan Artist Paterson was a cauldron for Fred Duignan’s art and life. He was brought up in nearby industrial Carlstadt and suburban Rutherford. After a few years in California, he became a resident in the Paterson artist housing for two significant decades of his creative life (1984-2003). While doing odd jobs to support his art, he become a generator of the local art scene as Executive Director of the Essex-Phoenix Artists Association (’87-88), art writer [ Cover Magazine (NYC, ’88-90) and the NJ Herald (‘97)] and Curator of Contemporary Art of the Paterson Museum (1992-97). All of this rooted him in Paterson’s original arts creation within the radically changing industrial place of his time. Three modalities in Duignan’s paintings tell us much about this place. First were abstracted black silhouetted images of the beauty and decay of the old silk, locomotive, aircraft engine, and firearms mills of the period, with tilted walls, empty windows, and angled energies against haunting skies and the crashing force of the Falls. Second were 10 portraits of his fellow artists and poets of the mills-- expressive, wrought, dark and light, giving off presence and fraught commitment. Most individuals were from Paterson and environs. These artists and writers went out into the community and beyond as photographers, teachers, mural painters, and local characters. A creative scene had developed and had its long-lasting effect. Third is the example of Duignan’s own art imbued with the cross-currents of this place over the whole of his career--struggles of inner and outer darkness, vivid color, overlays of living paint, found symbols, and fragmented figuration that thematically speak of chaos and transcendence of that chaos.

Sarah Smith presents her latest series of paintings, exploring the theme of urban landscapes. The exhibition will feature over 20 new works, created during her residency in Venice. Opening reception: May 14, 6-9pm.

Weinstein seeks to decompress the experience of memory from a photo album of brief scenes to the longer durations of transitions of light, subtle movements of forms, and the integration of pure observation with experience. Castello 925 presents Martin Weinstein · Nothing Goes Away in the gallery located at Sestere Castello 925, Fondamenta San Giuseppe, in Venice, Italy. This solo exhibition of the artist's most recent dimensional paintings on multiple acrylic sheets captures Venice - both outside, with its magnificent water and skyscapes, and interior domestic spaces, all rendered transparently. Weinstein's paintings are also simply responses to what is loved: a garden, a flower, the sun through the clouds, the city of Venice, his beloveds, the calm of an afternoon, or the atmosphere preceding a storm. For Weinstein, the list is both vast and intimate, serving as wordless journal entries about the poetry of time and memory.

Leith captures the transient light reflecting off water, filtering through branches and vibrating from waterfalls, clouds and streams. Inspired by the poetics of the woodlands, Leith captures the transient light reflecting off water, filtering through branches, and vibrating from waterfalls, clouds, and streams. Leith works with gold and silver leaf on mulberry paper to create a series of translucent gestural paintings installed with clothespins, like the laundry of the Castello district of Venice.

Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present Recent Paintings, an exhibition of new works by John Doe. The show will feature a selection of large-scale paintings that explore the artist's ongoing interest in color and form.