There are highlights of the curated sector. The Austrian Pavilion is probably the talk of the Biennale, featuring Florentina Holzinger’s batshit crazy, borderline unsafe performances. Upside-down performers hang from a gigantic bell, clanging their torsos against the metal. Some are zooming around on jet skis in a water tank that’s impressively built into the pavilion building that’s stood in the Giardini since the 1930s. The curated sector is a bit forgettable, all grays and browns and yellows, as one curator put it. I loved Otobong Nkanga’s installation on the exterior of the central pavilion, plus a thrilling display from Alvaro Barrington, who drove a gigantic truck from London and installed new paintings on the side of it. If this Biennale mints any art stars, there you have them.
The mood in Venice is still borderline ecstatic, full of gossip, parties, and people chatting about art in their respective cities, trading business cards, discovering new talent, eating, drinking, and stumbling around, running into old friends. There’s a critical mass of incredible shows—but they’re almost all at private museums, funded by collectors or galleries, staged at palazzos either owned by the benefactors or rented from the City of Venice.
New this year is AMA Venezia, the brainchild of collector Laurent Asscher, who meticulously restored a former soap factory in Cannaregio to inaugurate his own space. He even has a little bar in the middle, dubbed Larry’s Bar, featuring photos of Larry Gagosian—including the iconic Jean Pigozzi snap of him with Charles Saatchi and Leo Castelli reading an art book on a yacht in St. Barths—plus Elizabeth Peyton’s portrait of Gagosian, which is such a treat to see.
The show at AMA, “AURA,” has a series of grotto-esque rooms devoted to single artists—Joseph Yaeger, Brandon Morris, Sang Woo Kim—before opening up into a grand exposed-brick space that includes Christopher Wool, Laura Owens, and a new painting by Jenny Saville, who is showing in town at the Ca’ Pesaro palazzo.
The highlight of “AURA”, and perhaps one of the best things in Venice, is Tino Sehgal’s The Kiss. It’s a work that first premiered in 2002, but it hasn’t been seen in years—and never like this. The controversial performance takes place in a pitch-black room, and the performers are completely nude. At first, you see nothing, and there’s a bit of knocking around in the space. After a few minutes, your eyes gradually adjust, and the performers, the maybe-lovers, come into view, flesh on the ground, writhing and making out and embracing. The enigmatic artist even gave a talk with Asscher at the space, a rare public dialogue. The Kiss has got more raw power and charisma than anything I saw earlier at the Giardini.
At the Palazzo Diedo, the private museum established by Nicolas Berggruen in 2022, there’s a group show curated by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli. I loved Sanya Kantarovsky’s new paintings, installed at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. The estate of the artist Matthew Wong, who died by suicide in 2019, staged a grand show of rarely seen paintings and works on paper, a sweeping survey of an incredibly talented artist, now famous for insane auction prices. River at Dusk sold for $6.6 million, The Night Watcher sold for $5.9 million, and Green Room sold for $5.3 million. I knew Wong, who loved being on the ground at biennales and art fairs. He would have adored having a big show in Venice.
