Anish-Kapoor

Eight painter and sculptor collateral shows fan out across Venice’s palazzi this spring, and the question this piece answers is which palazzo holds which painter — and which of those painter-palazzo pairings carries the weight of the edition. The painters-by-palazzo question is rarely answered properly because the answer is geographic, not alphabetical, and because the heaviest pairing on the list — Marina Abramović staged against Titian’s Pietà of 1575–76 inside the Gallerie dell’Accademia — is the one the alphabetical surveys bury. The painter-and-sculptor collaterali opened on a staggered calendar between 25 April and 9 May, which means the city has been absorbing them one palazzo at a time. Hernan Bas at Ca’ Pesaro, Anish Kapoor at Palazzo Manfrin, Georg Baselitz at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Marina Abramović at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Nalini Malani at the Magazzini del Sale, Sanya Kantarovsky at Palazzo Loredan, Barry X Ball inside Palladio’s basilica on San Giorgio Maggiore, and Fondazione Dries Van Noten at Palazzo Pisani Moretta — that is the painter-by-palazzo list, and it does not move. ...

Eight Venetian palazzi and historic venues reopen across the same May weekend in 2026, each given over to a single artist or single curatorial pair, and the most-discussed shows of the 61st Venice Art Biennale are, almost without exception, not in the Giardini. The venice biennale palazzo takeovers this spring stretch from Anish Kapoor’s Palazzo Manfrin in Cannaregio to Fondazione Prada’s pairing of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Ca’ Corner della Regina, with Marina Abramović inside the Gallerie dell’Accademia and Georg Baselitz, posthumously, on San Giorgio Maggiore. Read together they form a typology of how artists, foundations and institutions are now using Venice as a venue. ...

Labics’s restoration of the Central Pavilion at the Giardini is the architectural news of the 2026 pavilions circuit — the first updated architectural backbone the Giardini has had since the 1948–1956 Carlo Scarpa interventions, and the building that sets the rhythm for a pavilion-by-pavilion reading that runs from Anish Kapoor’s Palazzo Manfrin in Cannaregio to Palladio’s Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. This is the architecture-first read of the 2026 edition: pavilions, palazzi and restorations parsed as buildings before they are parsed as shows. Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys” — the framework she signed off before her unexpected death in May 2025, and which her appointed team has realised posthumously — opens to the public on 9 May 2026 as a constellation of restored architecture rather than a single building. Read the venues first and the works second, and the curatorial argument is already legible in stone, brick, fresco and steel before any painting goes on a wall. ...