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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.