“If All Time Is Eternally Present”
Where: Palazzo Nervi-Scattolin
When: May 9 – June 7
Why It’s Worth a Look: “If All Time Is Eternally Present” displays three film works by Tai Shani, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, and Kandis Williams, with support from Bottega Veneta. From a woman’s travelogue through South Korea to features of animated anthropomorphic lizards, the works are wide-reaching explorations of place, movement, and power.
Know Before You Go: The exhibition is the first in a new cycle of curatorial projects centered around the work of Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. By projecting the video works of Shani, Bennani & Barki, and Williams on the façade of the Palazzo Nervi-Scattolin, the show engages with the fleeting quality of architecture in Venice, both by way of the Biennale’s many pavilions and the city’s slow sink into the sea.
“Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change”
Where: Palazzo Grassi
When: Through January 10, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Michael Armitage has distinguished himself as an unsparing narrator of the present. In over 45 paintings and more than 100 studies, the Kenyan-British painter constructs fierce interrogations of the consequences of war, corruption, migration, and economic stability, especially in equatorial regions.
Know Before You Go: With his oil paintings on barkcloth, Armitage draws upon a deep well of inspiration, including real-life field work, such as his time with a team of journalists covering opponents of the Kenyan government and the violent crackdown that ensued during the 2017 elections.
“Amoako Boafo: It doesn’t have to always make sense”
Where: Palazzo Grimani
When: May 6 – November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: Amoako Boafo’s first solo show in Italy draws explicitly upon the Renaissance architecture of the palace it takes place within. The artist’s reimagining of Black figuration is presented alongside a long legacy of Venetian masterworks, opening up the canon of portraiture.
Know Before You Go: The Ghanian artist has been a community-building force in Accra, opening up a gallery and artist residence called dot.ateliers, but Europe is still catching up to his career. He had his first major European museum exhibition in Vienna only in 2024.
“Transforming Energy” by Marina Abramović
Where: Gallerie dell’Accademia
When: May 6 – October 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: Marina Abramović makes history as the first living female artist to receive a major show at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. On her 80th birthday, Abramović will display her interactive “transitory objects”: beds of crystal, swinging metronomes, and illuminated plinths, alongside her performance work.
Know Before You Go: In 1983, Abramović created a modern Pietà with her then-partner and creative collaborator Ulay. Now, 43 years later, that work will be contrasted against Titian’s final unfinished masterwork, a Pietà created in 1576.
“Helter Skelter” by Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
Where: Fondazione Prada
When: May 9 – November 23
Why It’s Worth a Look: Exhibition curator Nancy Spector writes that both Arthur Jafa and Prichard Prince are “image scavengers.” At face value, Jafa, an artist with a mission to interrogate and venerate Black American aesthetics, and Prince, a white man born a decade earlier plumbing the depths of the American psyche, don’t seem aligned. But the two share a distinct sensibility, which Spector puts on full display at the Fondazione Prada.
Know Before You Go: Across mediums, both artists reckon with the American project by appropriating, recontextualizing, inverting, and referencing pop cultural ephemera—from movies to pulp novels to social media posts. This show, comprised of 50-plus works including photography, video, installation, sculpture, and painting, unfolds across two floors of the Venetian palazzo, bringing two towering figures into conversation with each other at last.
“Fanfare/Lament” by Matt Copson
Where: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
When: May 7
Why It’s Worth a Look: On May 7, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo will open its third location on a small island in the North Venice lagoon. The island, which has been abandoned for decades, once belonged to a 11th century monastery before it was taken over by the Fondazione a few years ago.
Know Before You Go: To celebrate, the Fondazione is launching a series of events in conjunction with the Venice Biennale including a solo show by Matt Copson and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, a series of photographs by Giovanna Silva and Antonio Fortugno, and a series of new outdoor site-specific installations by Goshka Macuga, Pamela Rosenkranz, Claire Fontaine, Thomas Schütte, Hugh Hayden, and Mario García Torres.
“Alighiero Boetti”
Where: SMAC Venice
When: May 7 – November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: This career-spanning show turns its eye to one of the most influential artists of Italy’s post-war period. A defining member of the Arte Povera movement, Alighiero Boetti eventually left behind sculpture for conceptual art and weaving, done in collaboration with great Afghan craftsmen.
Know Before You Go: Boetti had a longstanding obsession with notions of systems, process, and duality. He even went as far as to sign his name as Alighiero e Boetti, meaning Alighiero and Boetti, two selves in one. This fascination was most famously encompassed in his embroidered maps, but the exhibition highlights how duality seeped into everything he created, from a room full of self-portraits to his “Arazzi,” colorfully embroidered word puzzles.
“The Only True Protest is Beauty”
Where: Fondazione Dries Van Noten
When: Through October 26
Why It’s Worth a Look: Fashion auteur Dries Van Noten has finally unveiled his crafts-focused foundation with a vast multimedia show uniting fashion, jewelry, design, art, photography, and ceramics.
Know Before You Go: The show’s co-curator Geert Bruloot also organized MoMu’s buzzy new exhibition about the Antewerp Six, the beloved cohort of iconoclastic Belgian designers that Van Noten belongs to.
“Basic Failure” by Sanya Kantarovsky
Where: L’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Palazzo Loredan
When: May 6 – November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Moscow-born, Upstate New York-based artist’s paintings dwell in a state of ambivalence: brushstrokes are sometimes thick, almost impasto, while others are thin, almost worn through. His subject matter, too, often involves figures caught endlessly desiring forbidden things.
Know Before You Go: Though Sanya Kantarovsky is often thought of as a painter, his work spans sculpture, video, and ceramics as well, which will also be on display at the Palazzo Loredan. (You can read the show’s notes by CULTURED columnist Jamieson Webster here.)
“Strange Rules”
Where: Palazzo Diedo
When: May 4 – November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: A blockbuster trio of curators—Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist—inaugurate the headquarters of Berggruen Arts & Culture with a vast new group show and program centered around what they have coined “Protocol Art.” At its heart, Protocol Art is an aesthetic that engages with the invisible architecture of cultural production in the digital era—namely, algorithms and A.I. models.
Know Before You Go: The expansive show stretches across all three floors. The ground floor will feature a major new collaborative commission by Dryhurst and Herndon, in partnership with SUB (it will also be home for a series of time-based art performances.) The first floor will be home to site-specific installations from the likes of Lynn Hershman Leeson, Joshua Citarella, Philippe Parreno, and Ayoung Kim, while the second floor will screen video works. The exhibition also coincides with the release of a publication expounding upon the theory of Protocol Art.
“Erwin Wurm: Dreamers”
Where: Museo Fortuny
When: May 6 – November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Austrian sculptor will be exhibiting his pillowy sculptures for the first time in Italy this May. By appending sculptured legs, arms, and hands to chairs, sweaters, buckets, and fruit, Erwin Wurm playfully interrogates the sculptural qualities of the human form, mundane and changeable.
Know Before You Go: Humor is at the heart of Wurm’s project. His puffy, bloated “Fat Car” series has shown around the globe while his “One-Minute Sculpture” series provided the inspiration for the Red Hot Chili Peppers music video for “Can’t Stop.”
“5 Works” by Lydia Ourahmane
Where: Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation
When: May 5 – November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Algiers and Barcelona-based artist finally unveils the work she has been producing as a resident at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation since January of this year. The muse for the series? The island of Poveglia and its air of myth and mystery.
Know Before You Go: Lydia Ourahmane participated in the Venice Biennale back in 2024, presenting a sculpture made from a pair of vintage doors excised from the artist’s Algiers apartment. Her conceptual work probes the many interlocking histories that animate spaces, domestic and otherwise.
“David Salle: Painting in the Present Tense”
Where: Palazzo Cini
When: May 6 – September 27
Why It’s Worth a Look: In the heart of a home museum, David Salle continues his provocative engagement with a custom A.I. model, driving painting trained on the artist’s own early-’90s series “Tapestry Paintings.” (Those ’90s paintings were themselves based on 18th-century Russian tapestries, which were themselves based on 16th and 17th-century Italian tapestries. Salle’s use of A.I. probes questions of authorship stretching back centuries.)
Know Before You Go: Salle’s use of A.I. in previous work has not been without controversy. Leadership at Sprüth Magers eventually removed one of Salle’s paintings from his show “My Frankenstein” when the artist Kelly Reemsten flagged undeniable similarities between it and her own painting, Impact, 2021.
“Jenny Saville”
Where: Ca’ Pesaro
When: Through November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: Like Lucien Freud before her, Jenny Saville is preoccupied with all the folds, puckers, and dimples of human flesh. But while Freud’s work depicted the body as he appraised it from his easel, Saville’s work—from the radical corpulence of her early-’90s paintings to the smeary innocence of her recent work—shows what it is like to inhabit a female body.
Know Before You Go: This is the first major exhibition of the 55-year-old artist’s work in Venice. The show, which spans her entire career, will also feature a previously unseen cycle of work dedicated to the city of Venice itself.
“Interiors” by Matthew Wong
Where: Palazzo Tiepolo Passi
When: May 6 – November 1
Why It’s Worth a Look: This exhibition at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi shows 35 little-seen paintings from Wong made from 2015 through with the artist’s untimely death in 2019. The show is what it says on the label: strange, haunting snapshots of home, often rendered in a rhapsodic blue.
Know Before You Go: Wong began as a photography student, but he took to painting quickly, assimilating the emotive techniques of Van Gogh and Seurat into his own preoccupations with isolation and landscape. Figures hesitate in doorways or peer awkwardly out of windows, trapped in a twilight between one state and the next.
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