See the Work of Gallery Artists in and Around Venice

May 11–November 24

Gallery artists Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Carol Bove, and Stan Douglas are included in the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, the exhibition is titled May You Live in Interesting Times, after an ancient Chinese curse referenced in a speech given by British MP Sir Austen Chamberlain in the late 1930s The exhibition will focus on the work of artists, Rugoff states, "who challenge existing habits of thought and open up our readings of objects and images, gestures, and situations. Art of this kind grows out of a practice of entertaining multiple perspectives: of holding in mind seemingly contradictory and incompatible notions, and juggling diverse ways of making sense of the world."

On view through December 15, 2019

A beaded curtain by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and work by Lucas Arruda are included in the Pinault Collection group exhibition Luogo e Segni, at Punta della Dogana. Curated by Martin Bethenod, director of Palazzo Grassi–Punta della Dogana, and independent curator Mouna Mekouar, the show is titled after a painting by Carol Rama. Some one hundred works were selected based on the particular relationships they establish with their environments.

On view through January 6, 2020

As part of the cycle of monographic shows dedicated to major contemporary artists, launched in 2012 and alternating with thematic exhibitions of the Pinault Collection, Palazzo Grassi presents Luc Tuymans’s first solo exhibition in Italy. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with the artist, the show is entitled La Pelle (The Skin), after Curzio Malaparte’s 1949 novel, which also gave its name to one of Tuymans’s paintings. It includes more than eighty works from the Pinault Collection, international museums, and private collections, and focuses on the artist’s paintings from 1986 to today. With this exhibition, "Luc Tuymans, master of moral complexities, tries something new," Nina Siegal writes in The New York Times.

Through August 31

The inaugural show at Fondazione Coppola in Vicenza, a city some fifty miles west of Venice, is a dual exhibition of works by Neo Rauch and his wife, Rosa Loy. La Torre features drawings and paintings by the two artists that have never been presented publicly before. The title of the show, which means "The Tower," references the historic building in which the foundation is housed. Placing the works in dialogue across six levels, the exhibition invokes the idea of symbolic progression as the visitor ascends to the building’s top floor, which affords 360-degree views of the surrounding city.

May 8–November 24

Featuring a painting titled Ditch (2009) by Lisa Yuskavage, Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum is an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale organized by The Brooklyn Rail’s Phong Bui and Francesca Pietropaolo. Addressing environmental crisis in the age of climate change, the exhibition brings together works by seventy-three artists whose work invites "critical awareness on the fragility of nature and human life while poetically invoking the regeneration of living systems." Installed in the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti, an 18th-century church in the Cannaregio section of Venice, the show will be accompanied by a program of free public conversations with artists, scientists, scholars, and writers, poetry readings, and musical performances from May 8 through 10 and during the run of the Biennale.

May 9–November 24

Rose Wylie is among the artists participating in GLASSTRESS Venice 2019 at Fondazione Berengo Art Space in Murano, Venice—the home of traditional Murano glassblowing. Now into its sixth edition, GLASSTRESS is a collateral event of the Venice Biennale in which contemporary artists, with the help of Berengo Studio’s master artisans, are invited to engage with the creative possibilities of glass. An abandoned glass furnace provides a striking exhibition space for this year’s presentation, which is being curated by artists Vik Muniz and Koen Vanmechelen.

May 11–November 24, 2019

Featuring more than fifty works as well as archival objects, a major retrospective of Yun Hyong-keun’s work travels to Palazzo Fortuny, in Venice, following its initial presentation last year at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), in Seoul. The show explores the life and work of the influential Korean artist, who gained early recognition abroad. Although Yun’s work has been exhibited widely, including in France and the United States, where Donald Judd showed his paintings in the early 1990s, this show marked the first presentation of his work at a national institution in Korea. "The decision to present Yun Hyong-keun’s work in Venice," the Palazzo Fortuny release states, "is also based on the conviction that his art is in particular harmony with this city of land and water." In addition to the paintings, the exhibition at MMCA features extensive personal materials that have never before been shown, including early drawings, archival photographs, and excerpts from the diary Yun began keeping in 1975. Space is given over to a detailed reproduction of the studio that the artist used for the last twenty-four years of his life, itself part of the house that he had built after his own design, in Seoul’s Seogyo-dong neighborhood.

Image: Installation view, Luc Tuymans, La Pelle, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2019. © Palazzo Grassi. Photo by Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti