Painters by Palazzo: Abramović vs Titian at Accademia
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. ...