The opening of the 61st International Art Exhibition once again confirms Venice as a privileged observatory for reading the transformations of the global art scene. As we have already pointed out, the focus of the Biennale 2026 is on narratives and perspectives that lie outside the Western axis, exploring the “minor keys” of contemporaneity: epistemological systems, memories and visions that have remained on the margins of the dominant story. But the Biennale is also a place to observe the evolving relationship between luxury and contemporary culture. If in the past the big brands merely presided over the calendar with collateral events, today their role appears radically transformed. The maisons are increasingly moving as cultural institutions, interweaving production identity, curatorial research and long-term planning within the symbolic places of the Lagoon. This is an increasingly structured presence, already evident even during the recently concluded Design Week in Milan.
The panorama of interventions is broad and crosses the city’s vital nodes. Bottega Veneta strengthens its dialogue with the Pinault Collection by supporting Lorna Simpson’s solo exhibition at Punta della Dogana; Fondazione Prada occupies Ca’ Corner della Regina with an incisive reflection on American visual culture through Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince. On the institutional front, Gruppo Zegna becomes the main sponsor of the Italian Pavilion, linking its “green thinking” to Chiara Camoni’s material research. Alongside the big names, new realities emerge, such as Fondazione Dries Van Noten, which debuts at Palazzo Pisani Moretta with an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the dialogue between craftsmanship, art and experimentation. From the Marciana Library, where Fondazione Bvlgari reflects on the theme of memory through the women artists of its prize, to the performances of Jordan Roth, fashion in Venice 2026 seems to want to abandon the simple logic of visibility to take on a more intellectual and curatorial role, proposing itself as the custodian of an artisanal and cultural knowledge that today also takes on the value of a form of resistance.
Dries Van Noten Foundation: “The Only True Protest is Beauty” at Palazzo Pisani Moretta
For Dries Van Noten, beauty never coincides with mere decorative exercise: it is tension, friction, critical possibility. With the opening of the Dries Van Noten Foundation on April 25, 2026, the Belgian designer presents an exhibition-manifesto with the eloquent title: The Only True Protest is Beauty. Together with life and vision partner Patrick Vangheluwe, Van Noten builds a project that transcends the exhibition dimension to become a cultural statement. The title, inspired by a verse by Phil Ochs, suggests that in times of crisis the search for harmony can become an authentically subversive gesture. The setting is Palazzo Pisani Moretta, transformed for the occasion into a fluid and living space, far from museum rigidity. Through twenty rooms distributed on the three levels of the Piano Nobile, Van Noten personally orchestrates an immersive path that brings together more than two hundred works. Here fashion, jewelry, art and material research dialogue without hierarchies, while craftsmanship is celebrated as a universal language capable of crossing disciplines and cultures.
Bottega Veneta: “Lorna Simpson. Third Person” at Punta della Dogana
For Bottega Veneta, Venice has never been just an aesthetic setting, but a founding part of its cultural identity. This is demonstrated by the exclusive sponsorship of Lorna Simpson. Third Person, the major solo exhibition opening on March 29, 2026 at Punta della Dogana. Curated by Emma Lavigne for the Pinault Collection, the exhibition marks the return to Europe, after more than a decade, of one of the most influential figures in American contemporary art. Lorna Simpson, born in 1960, has redefined the language of the image in recent decades, moving from the conceptual photography of the 1990s to an increasingly layered and visceral painting capable of interrogating memory, identity and the construction of the collective narrative. For Bottega Veneta, this collaboration represents a further chapter in a now well-established dialogue with the Pinault Collection, following projects dedicated to Thomas Schütte, Pierre Huyghe and Bruce Nauman. A harmony based on the same attention to detail, the value of slow time and a conception of craftsmanship as a cultural as well as a productive practice. The project, made in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, spans two decades of the artist’s research between monumental collages and paintings originally presented at the Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor in 2015. In parallel, the maison will also support If All Time Is Eternally Present at Campo Manin, realized together with the Pier Luigi Nervi Foundation: a public intervention with a strong visual and cultural impact that transforms the city’s architecture into a narrative surface.
Fondazione Prada: “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince” at Ca’ Corner della Regina
There are images that do not merely represent the real, but absorb, manipulate and return it as fetish or denunciation. This is the tension that runs through Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, the exhibition hosted by Fondazione Prada in the spaces of Ca’ Corner della Regina. Curated by Nancy Spector, the exhibition brings together two radical figures in American visual culture, united by an approach that transforms appropriation into a critical tool. Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince act as archaeologists of contemporary imagery: they retrieve images from YouTube, social media, advertising, pulp literature, and popular culture, reassembling them into a disturbing and deeply political narrative. The more than fifty works in the exhibition compose a geography of American contradictions. On the one hand, Jafa reflects on the aesthetics of Blackness and the urgency of redefining African American representation; on the other, Prince oscillates between critique of white masculinity and fascination with the dark side of the American dream. Even the title, Helter Skelter, simultaneously evokes chaos, spectacle and violence: from the Beatles to the eerie shadow of Charles Manson’s racial theories. The result is a deliberately unstable and undisciplined exhibition, accompanied by an unpublished zine that collects images exchanged by the two artists during the construction of the project. In this tight confrontation, America emerges as territory traversed by irreconcilable rifts: spirituality and slavery, freedom and voyeurism, entertainment and trauma. Jafa and Prince transform contemporary visual excess into a tool for critical analysis, reminding us how today the true act of resistance still passes through the ability to look.
Zegna: Italian Pavilion with Chiara Camoni’s “Con te con tutto”
For Zegna, supporting the Italian Pavilion is not just a patronage operation, but a declaration of cultural continuity. On the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition, the group led by Gildo Zegna becomes Main Sponsor of Chiara Camoni’s project Con te con tutto (With you with everything), curated by Cecilia Canziani and on view from May 24 to November 22. The relationship between Zegna and the art world is rooted in a story that began more than a decade ago with ZegnArt and now finds a natural extension in Chiara Camoni’s practice. The artist’s research, based on matter, transformation and relationship with the landscape, dialogues directly with the yarns of Lanificio Zegna, with mineral and vegetable elements from the Biella area and with that ecological vision that has always characterized Oasi Zegna. The Italian Pavilion is thus transformed into an ecosystem in which nature, ritual and craftsmanship coexist, restoring a poetic and collective dimension to the material. As Gildo Zegna explained, supporting the Pavilion means continuing a historic commitment to territory, culture and Italian manufacturing, reaffirming the value of a constant dialogue between business and artistic research. A bond that is further strengthened with the solo exhibition dedicated to Chiara Camoni at Oasi Zegna, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and opened on May 22. An ideal bridge between Venice and the Biella Alps, which reiterates how true contemporary luxury lies in the ability to generate cultural value over time.
Espace Louis Vuitton: “The Evil Eye” by Clément Cogitore
With The Evil Eye, hosted at Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice as part of the Hors-les-murs program, Clément Cogitore offers a cold and highly lucid reflection on the contemporary condition. An artist who has always been interested in the border territories between ethnography, ritual and cinematic language, Cogitore observes the persistence of ritual dynamics within globalized society. Through found footage, artificial scenarios and overexposed images, the artist constructs a radical critique of the spectacularization of reality and the artificial happiness produced by consumerism. Winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2018, Cogitore uses the green screen as a metaphor for a prefabricated identity, constructed through images and simulations. In a world that turns even urban space into a commodity, The Evil Eye invites us to distrust representation and recover a deeper and more complex dimension of human experience.
Bvlgari Foundation at the Marciana National Library
Between high jewelry and cultural memory there is a common ground: the concept of legacy. It is around this idea that the Bvlgari Foundation’s first official exhibition project at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice is developed. Under the guidance of Jean-Christophe Babin, the maison engages two artists linked to the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize in a reflection on the relationship between archive, knowledge and transformation. In the Vestibule, Monia Ben Hamouda presents Fragments of Fire Worship: luminous neon sculptures that evoke an ancestral writing, suspended between calligraphic gesture and fire ritual. In the Salone Sansovino, Lara Favaretto instead concludes the project Momentary Monument – The Library through a monumental shelving composed of books selected not for rarity but for documentary density, enriched by images from her own personal archive. In an age dominated by digital dematerialization, Favaretto restores physicality and vulnerability to knowledge, reaffirming the value of circulation and shared memory. A partner of the Biennale until 2030, Bvlgari thus consolidates a cultural vision founded on research and the transmission of knowledge. If in Milan the Bvlgari Hotel will host a sculpture by Monia Ben Hamouda, in Venice the maison demonstrates how the true heritage to be preserved today is the ability to keep memory alive by transforming it into contemporary experience.
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