Venice, already a labyrinth of calli and canals, turns into a diffuse open-air museum during the Biennale. Across museums, palaces, foundations, and independent spaces, art spills into every corner of the city. The programme is so vast that navigating events, dates, and venues can feel like a feat worthy of an explorer. Many of these exhibitions rank among the most anticipated on the international art calendar this year.
All the exhibitions to see in Venice during the 2026 Biennale
Beyond the Biennale, Venice becomes a labyrinth of international art. Here’s our guide to the must-see exhibitions unfolding across the city.
Curated by Anne Morin, in collaboration with Denis Curti Le Stanze della Fotografia presents the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Horst P. Horst, one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography. Featuring more than 400 works—including vintage prints, archival materials, magazines, drawings and letters—the exhibition traces seven decades of the artist’s career, highlighting the architectural and classical dimension of his imagery. Best known for his iconic photographs for Vogue, Horst transformed fashion photography into a rigorous construction of light, space and proportion.
Image: HORST P. HORST, Madame Bernon, corset by Detolle for Mainbocher, 1939. Sezione/section: Vogue © Horst P. Horst Estate
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
With the support of Gagosian Marking the artist’s first major exhibition in Venice, the show brings together around thirty paintings tracing Jenny Saville’s career from the early 1990s to the present. One of the key figures in the revival of contemporary figurative painting, Saville is known for her monumental canvases exploring the representation of the body and its social and cultural implications. At Ca’ Pesaro, her works enter into dialogue with the city’s rich painting tradition and the legacy of the Venetian masters. The exhibition concludes with new works created by the artist in homage to Venice and conceived specifically for the museum.
Image: Jenny Saville, Hyphen, 1999. © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2026. Courtesy Gagosian.
Curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carrol The exhibition presents new site-specific works by the Repatriates Collective addressing the repatriation of cultural objects taken during the colonial era. The project draws on recent cases involving European institutions and Indigenous communities, including the Manchester Museum and the Anindilyakwa communities in Australia, as well as the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and Namibia. In parallel, the Research Room hosts Nature Speaks, a research initiative exploring the rights of nature and the proposal for legal recognition of the Venetian Lagoon.
Image: Still from Agua y Trenzas. A Manifestation of Connection, 2025, Vienna. Verena Melgarejo Weinandt. Courtesy of the artist and Ocean Space.
Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Caroline Bourgeois and Michelle Mlati Palazzo Grassi presents a major exhibition dedicated to Michael Armitage, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting. Bringing together more than 150 works, including historical pieces and new productions, the show explores the Kenyan-British artist’s language, poised between figuration and dreamlike imagery. Painted on bark cloth — a traditional fabric made from tree bark — Armitage’s works weave together personal memory, history and current events, addressing themes such as identity, power, migration and the sociopolitical tensions of the contemporary world.
Image: Michael Armitage, Don’t Worry There Will Be More, 2024. Pinault Collection.
Photo: Kerry McFate
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais Pinault Collection presents an exhibition at Palazzo Grassi dedicated to Indian artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar, bringing together two major multimedia installations created twenty years apart. Through a poetic language that intertwines documentation, memory and symbolic storytelling, Kanwar explores themes of power, violence and resistance. The works The Torn First Pages (2004–2008), addressing the struggle for democracy in Myanmar, and The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023), a meditation on death, impermanence and justice, create an immersive environment that reflects on the political and moral tensions of the present.
Image: Amar Kanwar, The Peacock’s Graveyard, 2023 (still). Pinault Collection. ©Amar Kanwar, Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery
Curated by Fernanda Brenner Punta della Dogana presents Algebra, a major solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth bringing together more than twenty years of practice alongside new works. The title refers to the Arabic term al-jabr, meaning “to restore what has been broken,” and becomes a metaphor for addressing the fractures of colonial history. Through installations, photographs, texts and traces of his long journeys across the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa, Nazareth investigates political borders, diasporic memory and forms of knowledge rooted in experience and relation.
Image: Paulo Nazareth, Untitled, Noticias de America (News from the Americas) series, 2011-2012. Pinault Collection. © Paulo Nazareth
Curated by Emma Lavigne
In partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Punta della Dogana hosts the first major European survey dedicated to Lorna Simpson’s painterly practice, bringing together around fifty works including paintings, collages, sculptures, installations and a film. The exhibition explores more than a decade of the American artist’s research into the construction of images, memory and the instability of representation. Through enigmatic figures, glacial landscapes and layered portraits, Simpson creates a visual universe where identity, history and perception intertwine.
Image: Lorna Simpson, Woman on a Snowball, 2018. © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition view ‘Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present’ at Punta della Dogana, 2020 © Palazzo Grassi.
Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
Presented by PinchukArtCentre and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation The exhibition brings together Ukrainian and international artists around the theme of joy as a radical act of humanity in times of war. Through installations, video, painting, and photography, the project stems from testimonies collected in Ukraine that recount the search for moments of life and resilience even under the most difficult circumstances. Moving between personal memories, landscapes, and bodies marked by conflict, the exhibition frames joy as a fragile yet persistent gesture of survival and shared humanity.
Image: Ashfika Rahman, Than Para_1:TanjiKun. Photo: Sandervan Wettum
Curated by Gražina Subelytė and Simon Grant The exhibition retraces Peggy Guggenheim’s brief yet pivotal London experience and the story of her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, active on Cork Street between 1938 and 1939. Through around one hundred artworks, archival materials and documents, the show reconstructs the context in which Guggenheim began shaping her role as a collector and patron of modern art. In just eighteen months the gallery became a key platform for international avant-garde movements, presenting artists associated with abstraction and Surrealism, including Kandinsky, Arp, Mondrian and Tanguy. The exhibition highlights a formative chapter in the history of one of the most influential collectors of the twentieth century.
Image: Peggy Guggenheim a Hayford Hall, ca. 1934, Private Collection.
Courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Curated by Dries Van Noten together with Geert Bruloot The presentation explores beauty as a force capable of provoking, questioning, and generating transformation. Spread across the ground floor and the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Pisani Moretta, it brings together over 200 works spanning fashion, jewellery, art, design, photography, glass, and ceramics. Juxtaposing contemporary creations, haute couture archives, and material experiments, the exhibition creates intuitive dialogues between objects, disciplines, and the palace’s historic architecture, reflecting on beauty’s ability to challenge conventions.
Image: Palazzo Pisani Moretta. Photo: Camilla Glorioso
Curated by Elisa Carollo This exhibition revisits the work of Mel Ramos, one of the leading figures of American Pop Art, highlighting how he shaped a new visual mythology of femininity in postwar culture. Through paintings that combine advertising imagery, pin-up culture and references to the tradition of the classical nude, Ramos transforms the icons of mass media into monumental figures poised between irony, desire and myth.
Image: Mel Ramos Ads and Poster. Courtesy the artist.
Congolese performer and artist Faustin Linyekula presents two public performances at the Galeazze of the Arsenale Nord, historic naval structures now at the centre of cultural reuse projects supported by Scuola Piccola Zattere. 7 May 2026, 6 pm – Opening
Scuola Piccola Zattere also inaugurates two exhibitions by current residents Nikima Jagudajev and Rachel Youn. Jagudajev presents Like, a new hybrid project between documentary and video game, while Youn shows a selection of works continuing her research on body, object and space.
Image: Immagine: Studio, Scuola Piccola Zattere, Galeazze. Site visit Preview. ©Giacomo Bianco
Image: David Salle, Workplace, 2026. © David Salle / ARS New York. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery,London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul. Photo: John Berens.
Curated by Polly Staple Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation presents a major new commission by Lydia Ourahmane, developed following the artist’s residency in Venice. Through installations, sculpture, sound and moving image, Ourahmane explores landscapes of displacement and community, examining how the movement of people and objects is shaped by visible and invisible borders, state restrictions and systems of control. Often conceived as situations that extend beyond the exhibition space, her works involve the audience as material, subject and author.
Image: Lydia Ourahmane e Polly Staple, Venezia, 2025. Photo: Giacomo Bianco
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero
In partnership with Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery The exhibition presents Georg Baselitz’s most recent series of monumental paintings. The figures — often self-portraits or depictions of the artist’s wife Elke — lie naked against flat gold backgrounds that evoke medieval icons and Northern Renaissance painting. Executed with diluted black paint reminiscent of ink, the bodies appear as spectral presences suspended between painting and calligraphy. In this series Baselitz explores the symbolic potential of gold, creating an unexpected dialogue between iconographic tradition and his radical painterly language.
Image: Georg Baselitz, Türkische Hose auf dem Treppchen, 2025. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul © Georg Baselitz.
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi Canicula is the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainty” conceived by Fondazione In Between Art Film, which since 2022 has transformed the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto into a cinematic architecture dedicated to moving images. The exhibition presents eight new site-specific video installations commissioned from international artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Janis Rafa, P. Staff and Yuyan Wang. Inspired by the atmospheric phenomenon from which it takes its title, the project explores the conditions of vision and their metaphorical connections to human experience.
Image: Janis Rafa, Sacrificial Transgressions (working title), 2026. Production still. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Cristina Da Roit Museo Fortuny presents the first major monographic exhibition in Italy dedicated to Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm. Known for radically expanding the concept of sculpture, Wurm challenges notions of time, mass and surface through works that engage everyday objects and the human body. From the iconic One Minute Sculptures to later series, his practice blends humour, paradox and social critique, transforming the ordinary into a space for reflecting on the contradictions of contemporary society.
Image: Erwin Wurm, Ghost (Substitutes) , 2022. © Erwin Wurm, Bildrecht, Wien 2025
In collaboration with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin and Perrotin With more than thirty new paintings created for an immersive installation, Hernan Bas brings The Visitors to Ca’ Pesaro, a project that also stems from the artist’s residency in Venice. The works feature tourists suspended between real and imagined settings, moving through global travel icons, bucket-list destinations and sites associated with so-called dark tourism. Blending irony and estrangement, Bas reflects on the clichés of contemporary travel and the distance between visitors and the worlds they pass through.
Image: Immagine: Hernan Bas, Security in the shape of a silhouette (Audio tour, the kitchen at Alcatraz prison), 2025.
© Hernan Bas
Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo opens its new Venetian venue on the island of San Giacomo with a solo exhibition by Matt Copson. The project marks the inauguration of the foundation’s third space after Turin and Palazzo Re Rebaudengo in Guarene. Alongside the exhibition, the programme will include works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection and outdoor installations by artists such as Thomas Schütte, Goshka Macuga, Hugh Hayden and Pamela Rosenkranz.
Image: Eun Me-Ahn, Pinky Pinky Good, 2024. Isola di San Giacomo, Venezia.
Photo: Jacopo Trabuio. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
Curated by Nancy Spector The exhibition brings into dialogue two of the most influential figures in contemporary art. Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince share a radical approach to appropriation and the manipulation of images drawn from American popular culture, including film, pulp fiction, comics, music, media and social networks. Through thematic overlaps and juxtapositions, the project reveals affinities and tensions between their practices. While Jafa investigates Black identity and visual culture, Prince explores the ambiguities of white masculinity and the darker side of the American imagination.
Image: Arthur Jafa, The White Album , 2018 © Arthur Jafa
Exhibition view of “Arthur Jafa: Live Evil”, LUMA Arles, France, 2022.
Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex On the occasion of the Biennale Arte, Natasha Tontey presents a new multimedia installation at Ateneo Veneto combining video, sound, light and sculptural elements. The project reimagines the story of Indonesian resistance fighter Len Karamoy through references to Minahasan culture, bodily transformation and contemporary surveillance technologies. Blending ritual, science fiction and military imagery, the work reflects on bodily agency, resistance and systems of control in today’s technological landscape.
Image: Portrait. Natasha Tontey © Stella Ojala
Courtesy LAS Foundation
Curated by Marcello Dantas
Hosted in Carlo Scarpa’s iconic Olivetti Showroom in Piazza San Marco, the exhibition presents around twenty sculptures by Leandro Erlich, including several new works. Through hybrid and metamorphic forms — butterflies with ear-shaped wings, corals resembling cities, trees ending in human feet — the artist explores the relationship between nature, architecture and perception. The project engages directly with the historic space, suggesting how art can reshape the urban imagination and our experience of the world.
Image: Leandro Erlich, Pulled by the Roots, cast resin, cast bronze and acrylic sheets, © Rubica (2). Courtesy of the artist and the Olivetti Showroom.
Curated by Jessica Morgan This major solo exhibition traces more than seven decades of Lee Ufan’s practice. Presented at SMAC Venice in the Procuratie of Piazza San Marco, the show brings together historical and recent paintings, sculptures and a new site-specific installation, highlighting the artist’s exploration of gesture, material and spatial tension that has defined his role within Mono-ha and the Dansaekhwa movement.
Image: Lee Ufan, Relatum (precedentemente Iron Field), 1969/2019. Foto dell’installazione, Dia Beacon, New York. © Lee Ufan/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
Curated by Chiara Carrera and Marta Barina If All Time Is Eternally Present transforms the modernist façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin into an urban screen for video works by Kandis Williams, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, and Tai Shani. Projected nightly in Campo Manin, the works create a dialogue between moving image, architecture and public space, addressing themes of power, identity, collective memory and political transformation. The exhibition inaugurates a new program by the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation exploring the intersections between contemporary art and the built environment.
Image: Immagine: Kandis Williams, A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror, 2025. Video collage, 50 min. Courtesy the Artist. © Kandis Williams
Curated by Clara Tosi Pamphili With Fragile Forces W, Thomas De Falco presents a large-scale textile installation accompanied by live performances at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Structured around the symbolic use of gold, the project brings together body, space and material through the artist’s wrapping technique, in which performers and environment are enveloped to form living compositions between tableau vivant and textile sculpture. Reflecting on the “fragile forces” shaping the present, the work evokes a collective dimension where silence becomes a space for listening, presence and connection.
Courtesy the artist.
View Article details
- Giorgia Aprosio
- 23 March 2026
This selection does not include the central exhibition or the national pavilions, whether at the Giardini and the Arsenale or in venues spread across the city. Rather, it should be understood as a starting point for navigating the vast panorama of satellite exhibitions that, from May to November 2026, will further enrich the experience of visiting Venice. Scroll through the gallery to discover our selection.
21 February – 5 July 2026
Curated by Anne Morin, in collaboration with Denis Curti
Le Stanze della Fotografia presents the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Horst P. Horst, one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography. Featuring more than 400 works—including vintage prints, archival materials, magazines, drawings and letters—the exhibition traces seven decades of the artist’s career, highlighting the architectural and classical dimension of his imagery. Best known for his iconic photographs for Vogue, Horst transformed fashion photography into a rigorous construction of light, space and proportion.
28 March – 22 November 2026
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
With the support of Gagosian
Marking the artist’s first major exhibition in Venice, the show brings together around thirty paintings tracing Jenny Saville’s career from the early 1990s to the present. One of the key figures in the revival of contemporary figurative painting, Saville is known for her monumental canvases exploring the representation of the body and its social and cultural implications. At Ca’ Pesaro, her works enter into dialogue with the city’s rich painting tradition and the legacy of the Venetian masters. The exhibition concludes with new works created by the artist in homage to Venice and conceived specifically for the museum.
28 March – 11 October 2026
Curated by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carrol
The exhibition presents new site-specific works by the Repatriates Collective addressing the repatriation of cultural objects taken during the colonial era. The project draws on recent cases involving European institutions and Indigenous communities, including the Manchester Museum and the Anindilyakwa communities in Australia, as well as the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and Namibia. In parallel, the Research Room hosts Nature Speaks, a research initiative exploring the rights of nature and the proposal for legal recognition of the Venetian Lagoon.
Photo: Kerry McFate
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
29 March 2026 – 10 January 2027
Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Caroline Bourgeois and Michelle Mlati
Palazzo Grassi presents a major exhibition dedicated to Michael Armitage, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting. Bringing together more than 150 works, including historical pieces and new productions, the show explores the Kenyan-British artist’s language, poised between figuration and dreamlike imagery. Painted on bark cloth — a traditional fabric made from tree bark — Armitage’s works weave together personal memory, history and current events, addressing themes such as identity, power, migration and the sociopolitical tensions of the contemporary world.
29 March 2026 – 10 January 2027
Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais
Pinault Collection presents an exhibition at Palazzo Grassi dedicated to Indian artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar, bringing together two major multimedia installations created twenty years apart. Through a poetic language that intertwines documentation, memory and symbolic storytelling, Kanwar explores themes of power, violence and resistance. The works The Torn First Pages (2004–2008), addressing the struggle for democracy in Myanmar, and The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023), a meditation on death, impermanence and justice, create an immersive environment that reflects on the political and moral tensions of the present.
29 March – 22 November 2026
Curated by Fernanda Brenner
Punta della Dogana presents Algebra, a major solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth bringing together more than twenty years of practice alongside new works. The title refers to the Arabic term al-jabr, meaning “to restore what has been broken,” and becomes a metaphor for addressing the fractures of colonial history. Through installations, photographs, texts and traces of his long journeys across the Americas, the Caribbean and Africa, Nazareth investigates political borders, diasporic memory and forms of knowledge rooted in experience and relation.
Exhibition view ‘Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present’ at Punta della Dogana, 2020 © Palazzo Grassi.
Photo: Marco Cappelletti.
29 March – 22 November 2026
Curated by Emma Lavigne
In partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Punta della Dogana hosts the first major European survey dedicated to Lorna Simpson’s painterly practice, bringing together around fifty works including paintings, collages, sculptures, installations and a film. The exhibition explores more than a decade of the American artist’s research into the construction of images, memory and the instability of representation. Through enigmatic figures, glacial landscapes and layered portraits, Simpson creates a visual universe where identity, history and perception intertwine.
April 6 – August 1, 2026
Presented by PinchukArtCentre and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation
The exhibition brings together Ukrainian and international artists around the theme of joy as a radical act of humanity in times of war. Through installations, video, painting, and photography, the project stems from testimonies collected in Ukraine that recount the search for moments of life and resilience even under the most difficult circumstances. Moving between personal memories, landscapes, and bodies marked by conflict, the exhibition frames joy as a fragile yet persistent gesture of survival and shared humanity.
Courtesy Peggy Guggenheim Collection
25 April – 19 October 2026
Curated by Gražina Subelytė and Simon Grant
The exhibition retraces Peggy Guggenheim’s brief yet pivotal London experience and the story of her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, active on Cork Street between 1938 and 1939. Through around one hundred artworks, archival materials and documents, the show reconstructs the context in which Guggenheim began shaping her role as a collector and patron of modern art. In just eighteen months the gallery became a key platform for international avant-garde movements, presenting artists associated with abstraction and Surrealism, including Kandinsky, Arp, Mondrian and Tanguy. The exhibition highlights a formative chapter in the history of one of the most influential collectors of the twentieth century.
April 25 – October 4, 2026
Curated by Dries Van Noten together with Geert Bruloot
The presentation explores beauty as a force capable of provoking, questioning, and generating transformation. Spread across the ground floor and the Piano Nobile of Palazzo Pisani Moretta, it brings together over 200 works spanning fashion, jewellery, art, design, photography, glass, and ceramics. Juxtaposing contemporary creations, haute couture archives, and material experiments, the exhibition creates intuitive dialogues between objects, disciplines, and the palace’s historic architecture, reflecting on beauty’s ability to challenge conventions.
3 May – 22 November 2026
Curated by Elisa Carollo
This exhibition revisits the work of Mel Ramos, one of the leading figures of American Pop Art, highlighting how he shaped a new visual mythology of femininity in postwar culture. Through paintings that combine advertising imagery, pin-up culture and references to the tradition of the classical nude, Ramos transforms the icons of mass media into monumental figures poised between irony, desire and myth.
5–6 May 2026, 6 pm
Congolese performer and artist Faustin Linyekula presents two public performances at the Galeazze of the Arsenale Nord, historic naval structures now at the centre of cultural reuse projects supported by Scuola Piccola Zattere.
7 May 2026, 6 pm – Opening
Scuola Piccola Zattere also inaugurates two exhibitions by current residents Nikima Jagudajev and Rachel Youn. Jagudajev presents Like, a new hybrid project between documentary and video game, while Youn shows a selection of works continuing her research on body, object and space.
5 May – 27 September 2026 At Galleria di Palazzo Cini, David Salle presents a new body of paintings developed through a custom artificial intelligence model trained on his Tapestry Paintings from the early 1990s. The works bring together multiple temporal layers of art history, from eighteenth-century Russian tapestries inspired by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian paintings to contemporary technological processes. Structured through grids and inset panels reminiscent of digital screens, the paintings reflect on the capacity of painting to hold different times and images within a single present.
5 May – 22 November 2026
Curated by Polly Staple
Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation presents a major new commission by Lydia Ourahmane, developed following the artist’s residency in Venice. Through installations, sculpture, sound and moving image, Ourahmane explores landscapes of displacement and community, examining how the movement of people and objects is shaped by visible and invisible borders, state restrictions and systems of control. Often conceived as situations that extend beyond the exhibition space, her works involve the audience as material, subject and author.
Photo: Stefan Altenburger
6 May – 27 September 2026
Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero
In partnership with Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
The exhibition presents Georg Baselitz’s most recent series of monumental paintings. The figures — often self-portraits or depictions of the artist’s wife Elke — lie naked against flat gold backgrounds that evoke medieval icons and Northern Renaissance painting. Executed with diluted black paint reminiscent of ink, the bodies appear as spectral presences suspended between painting and calligraphy. In this series Baselitz explores the symbolic potential of gold, creating an unexpected dialogue between iconographic tradition and his radical painterly language.
From 6 May 2026
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
Canicula is the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainty” conceived by Fondazione In Between Art Film, which since 2022 has transformed the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto into a cinematic architecture dedicated to moving images. The exhibition presents eight new site-specific video installations commissioned from international artists including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Janis Rafa, P. Staff and Yuyan Wang. Inspired by the atmospheric phenomenon from which it takes its title, the project explores the conditions of vision and their metaphorical connections to human experience.
6 May – 22 November 2026
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Cristina Da Roit
Museo Fortuny presents the first major monographic exhibition in Italy dedicated to Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm. Known for radically expanding the concept of sculpture, Wurm challenges notions of time, mass and surface through works that engage everyday objects and the human body. From the iconic One Minute Sculptures to later series, his practice blends humour, paradox and social critique, transforming the ordinary into a space for reflecting on the contradictions of contemporary society.
© Hernan Bas
Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro
7 May – 30 August 2026
In collaboration with Victoria Miro, Lehmann Maupin and Perrotin
With more than thirty new paintings created for an immersive installation, Hernan Bas brings The Visitors to Ca’ Pesaro, a project that also stems from the artist’s residency in Venice. The works feature tourists suspended between real and imagined settings, moving through global travel icons, bucket-list destinations and sites associated with so-called dark tourism. Blending irony and estrangement, Bas reflects on the clichés of contemporary travel and the distance between visitors and the worlds they pass through.
Photo: Jacopo Trabuio. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
From 7 May 2026
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo opens its new Venetian venue on the island of San Giacomo with a solo exhibition by Matt Copson. The project marks the inauguration of the foundation’s third space after Turin and Palazzo Re Rebaudengo in Guarene. Alongside the exhibition, the programme will include works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection and outdoor installations by artists such as Thomas Schütte, Goshka Macuga, Hugh Hayden and Pamela Rosenkranz.
Exhibition view of “Arthur Jafa: Live Evil”, LUMA Arles, France, 2022.
Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Courtesy Fondazione Prada
9 May – 23 November 2026
Curated by Nancy Spector
The exhibition brings into dialogue two of the most influential figures in contemporary art. Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince share a radical approach to appropriation and the manipulation of images drawn from American popular culture, including film, pulp fiction, comics, music, media and social networks. Through thematic overlaps and juxtapositions, the project reveals affinities and tensions between their practices. While Jafa investigates Black identity and visual culture, Prince explores the ambiguities of white masculinity and the darker side of the American imagination.
Courtesy LAS Foundation
9 May – 25 October 2026
Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex
On the occasion of the Biennale Arte, Natasha Tontey presents a new multimedia installation at Ateneo Veneto combining video, sound, light and sculptural elements. The project reimagines the story of Indonesian resistance fighter Len Karamoy through references to Minahasan culture, bodily transformation and contemporary surveillance technologies. Blending ritual, science fiction and military imagery, the work reflects on bodily agency, resistance and systems of control in today’s technological landscape.
9 May – 22 November 2026
Curated by Marcello Dantas
Hosted in Carlo Scarpa’s iconic Olivetti Showroom in Piazza San Marco, the exhibition presents around twenty sculptures by Leandro Erlich, including several new works. Through hybrid and metamorphic forms — butterflies with ear-shaped wings, corals resembling cities, trees ending in human feet — the artist explores the relationship between nature, architecture and perception. The project engages directly with the historic space, suggesting how art can reshape the urban imagination and our experience of the world.
Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
From 9 May 2026
Curated by Jessica Morgan
This major solo exhibition traces more than seven decades of Lee Ufan’s practice. Presented at SMAC Venice in the Procuratie of Piazza San Marco, the show brings together historical and recent paintings, sculptures and a new site-specific installation, highlighting the artist’s exploration of gesture, material and spatial tension that has defined his role within Mono-ha and the Dansaekhwa movement.
9 May – 7 June 2026
Curated by Chiara Carrera and Marta Barina
If All Time Is Eternally Present transforms the modernist façade of Palazzo Nervi Scattolin into an urban screen for video works by Kandis Williams, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, and Tai Shani. Projected nightly in Campo Manin, the works create a dialogue between moving image, architecture and public space, addressing themes of power, identity, collective memory and political transformation. The exhibition inaugurates a new program by the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation exploring the intersections between contemporary art and the built environment.
18 May – 14 June 2026
Curated by Clara Tosi Pamphili
With Fragile Forces W, Thomas De Falco presents a large-scale textile installation accompanied by live performances at Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Structured around the symbolic use of gold, the project brings together body, space and material through the artist’s wrapping technique, in which performers and environment are enveloped to form living compositions between tableau vivant and textile sculpture. Reflecting on the “fragile forces” shaping the present, the work evokes a collective dimension where silence becomes a space for listening, presence and connection.