This Italian spring has experienced an extraordinary density of cultural energy. From Art Week to Milan Design Week, the month of April has shaped up as a veritable creative continuum, littered with openings, fairs and exhibition projects. This widespread movement finds its peak on the weekend of May 8, with the official opening of the Venice Art Biennale. Artists, curators, critics and collectors converge on the city from around the world, drawn to what remains one of the most influential platforms for reading the state of contemporary art. The edition, titled In Minor Keys and curated by Koyo Kouoh, places decentralized narratives and perspectives far from the Western aesthetic axis at the center, a choice that has also sparked debate over the absence of Italian artists in the central pavilion. Alongside the Giardini and the Arsenale, however, Venice expands into a constellation of collateral exhibitions that run through museums, foundations and historic palaces-a diffuse ecosystem that deserves to be explored beyond the more crowded routes. Below is our selection.
Jenny Saville, Ca’ Pesaro
In the spaces of Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni with the support of Gagosian, Jenny Saville’s first major solo exhibition in Venice opens. The exhibition traces the artist’s entire trajectory from the 1990s to the present, focusing on the female body as a field of political, perceptual and symbolic tension. Both heir to and subversive of the great Western painting tradition, from Michelangelo to Rembrandt to Titian, Saville destabilizes its codes through painting that is carnal, monumental and deeply analytical. Historical works such as Proped (1992) and Hybrid (1997) dialogue with intense portraits such as Hyphen (1999) and Reverse (2002-2003), to more recent works in which color and material dissolve toward an almost abstract dimension. In recent works, his language openly addresses themes such as war and collective mourning, transforming news images into forms of universal experience.
The Only True Protest is Beauty, Dries Van Noten Foundation
In the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, the Dries Van Noten Foundation opened last April 25, inaugurating its program with a reflection on beauty as an active force, capable of seducing but also of cracking and questioning. Conceived by Dries Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe, the exhibition interprets craftsmanship as “manual” thinking, in which matter and gesture restore centrality to the experience of making. The non-linear itinerary brings together more than two hundred works between fashion, art and design, building a visual landscape in which eras and languages overlap without hierarchies. The dialogue between historical archives and contemporary creation – from Christian Lacroix to Rei Kawakubo to Ayham Hassan – redefines dressing as a cultural form and not just an aesthetic one.
Marina Abramović, Gallerie dell’Accademia
At the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Marina Abramović becomes the first living artist to occupy an institution traditionally devoted to the masters of the past with a major solo exhibition. Transforming Energy places performance in dialogue with the Venetian Renaissance, transforming the visitor from spectator to participant. The artist’s historical works and “Transitory Objects” activate a direct physical experience in which the body becomes a vehicle for energy and transformation. The most intense point of the exhibition is the comparison between his Pieta (with Ulay) and Titian’s Pieta, in a dialogue that spans the centuries to interrogate the meaning of pain and transcendence.
Erwin Wurm, Fortuny Museum
At the Fortuny Museum, Erwin Wurm transforms sculpture into an unstable and temporary process. In Dreamers, the work is no longer object but condition: body, time and everyday objects enter into a continuous game of transformation. The One Minute Sculptures directly engage the audience, while the series Substitutes reflects on the memory of the body through empty clothes, presences suspended between absence and trace. The dialogue with Mariano Fortuny becomes decisive: his idea of the palace as a total laboratory, where art, fabric and invention coexist without hierarchies, is echoed in Wurm’s works, which continuously alter and destabilize form. In this interweaving, the museum is configured as a true “semiosphere,” a living space in which meanings are generated by superposition and conflict.
The Shape of the Self, Ca’ Riviera
Ca’ Riviera, a new contemporary art center opening in 2026 in dialogue with the Biennale, is born on the Brenta Riviera. Founded by Founded by Leonardo Tiezzi and Riccardo Corò and housed in two sixteenth-century villas, it is proposed as a fluid cultural organism dedicated to the encounter between different languages.
The inaugural exhibition The Shape of the Self explores identity as an unstable process, linking historical figures such as Leonor Fini with contemporary artists such as Cecilia Granara, Yves Scherer and Chiara Capellini. The self thus emerges as a construction in constant metamorphosis, between presence, perception and dissolution.
If All Time Is Eternally Present, Fondazione Pier Luigi Nervi
The project, which we had written about a short while ago, is carried out by Fondazione Pier Luigi Nervi in collaboration with Bottega Veneta, and transforms the urban space of Campo Manin into an open exhibition surface, where video works by Kandis Williams, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki and Tai Shani are projected into the public space. The Foundation’s research, dedicated to the legacy of Pier Luigi Nervi, is based on the idea that architecture is not just construction, but a constantly evolving cultural language capable of relating technique, form and thought. Going into the specifics of the works, the exhibition brings together new, adapted and existing works: 2 Lizards (2020) by Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki; A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025), a new work by Kandis Williams; and My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains and All the Bodily Remains that Ever Were and Ever Will Be (2023-2026) by Tai Shani, a new production derived from the 2023 film of the same name.
[📷IPA]
