Postcards From Venice: Stefano Tonchi’s Highlights from the 61st Biennale

The opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale once again transformed Venice into the center of the art world, though according to PALMER Editorial Director Stefano Tonchi, this year the most compelling conversations were often happening outside the Biennale itself. “More than ever before, the rest of Venice felt bigger than the Giardini and the Arsenale,” he observed after several packed days moving between palazzos, foundations, pavilions, dinners, and private events across the city. “The strongest shows were elsewhere.”

Palm Beach, naturally, was well represented. One of the opening week’s major events was the Venetian Heritage gala sponsored by Dior, which this year raised funds for the continued restoration of Venice’s Ca’ d’Oro palace. Hosted by Peter Marino, president of Venetian Heritage, the dinner brought together the worlds of fashion, collecting, philanthropy, and contemporary art against the backdrop of the Biennale.

Dries Van Noten and Diane von Furstenberg were among those attending, alongside a notable Palm Beach contingent that included Cornelia Guest and Hilary Geary Ross and Wilbur Ross. “Peter Marino had all his ladies there,” Tonchi joked. The event also reflected the increasingly central role luxury houses now play in Venice’s preservation efforts, with Dior continuing its longstanding partnership with Venetian Heritage and its restoration projects throughout the city.

Here, Tonchi shares his highlight with me and anyone heading to Venice between now and the closing on November 22. Consider this your insider’s guide to the year’s strongest exhibitions.

 

Outside the Biennale: The Foundations, Palazzi, and Venetian Institutions

 

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
Fondazione Prada
Ca’ Corner della Regina

For Tonchi, one of the clearest highlights of the week was the major exhibition pairing Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Fondazione Prada, curated by Nancy Spector, formerly of the Guggenheim. “The real American Pavilion” as he describes it. Born a decade apart, Prince and Jafa share a method that lifts material from the wider visual culture, photographs, films, album covers, news reels, and refits it as art. The pairing reads as a thirty-year conversation between two pop-culture pirates who arrived at similar conclusions from opposite directions, one through still images and one through moving ones.

 

Lorna Simpson: Third Person
Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection

 

Curated by Emma Lavigne in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lorna Simpson’s exhibition emerged as another standout. Simpson’s ability to move between photography, film, collage, and sculpture felt especially aligned with the broader atmosphere of this year’s Venice Biennale.

 

Michael Armitage: The Promise of Change
Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

 

Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the show covers ten years of the Kenyan-British painter’s output across forty-six large canvases and close to a hundred sketches, where the painter’s lush, layered figurative works merge East African history, political violence, mythology, and dreamlike landscapes into psychologically charged scenes that are as seductive as they are unsettling.

 

Erwin Wurm: Dreamers
Museo Fortuny

This is the first major Italian survey of the Austrian sculptor’s career, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Cristina Da Roit. The One Minute Sculptures are present, instructing visitors to enter the work themselves with chairs, clothing, or books.

 

Georg Baselitz: Eroi d’Oro
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, San Giorgio Maggiore

 

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, the show opened six days after Baselitz’s death in April at 88. Gilded grounds carry his outlined bodies the way medieval icons carry their saints. Many of those bodies are larger-than-life self-portraits or images of his wife Elke, his lifelong companion and model. Baselitz recorded a film for the exhibition, calling the works his last.

 

Jenny Saville and Hernan Bas
Ca’ Pesaro, International Gallery of Modern Art

Saville’s first major Venetian retrospective gathers about thirty paintings and drawings from the 1990s through the present. In the same building, Bas’s The Visitors presents more than thirty new paintings about Venice and mass tourism, with the artist’s protagonists wandering between the Trevi Fountain, Alcatraz, and Chernobyl.

 

Inside the Biennale: In Minor Keys