The headline attractions of the 2026 Venice Biennale—at both its main venues, the Giardino and the Arsenale, and the big-name off-site exhibitions already covered here by PALMER’s Stefano Tonchi—can be overwhelming. So, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there is lots more to see in collateral exhibits surrounding the big show, most on view until November.
Many are mounted in palazzos and other landmarks normally closed to the public. There are also great restaurants farther afield than those on typical Biennale bucket lists. Let serendipity be your guide and wander the calles and campos beyond the Biennale.
One of the last things you see at the Biennale is one of the best. At the far end of the 12th Century Arsenale, La Serenissima’s ship-building complex, Con te con tutto, the official Italian exhibit, occupies the Tese delle Vergini, two 16th century timber warehouses a short walk from the main event. Within, curator Cecilia Canziani and artist Chiara Camoni created a landscape of ceramic and terracotta humanoid figures, and industrial and recycled waste that asks visitors to slow down and contemplate the larger show’s assault on the senses.
Con te con tutto, Italian Pavilion
In Sala delle Quattro Porte (or the Hall of the Four Doors) at the Museo Correr on St. Mark’s Square, Persian artist Bizhan Bassiri has mounted Principe. Il Nottambulo del Pensiero Magmatico, a grid of AI-assisted paintings of major artists from past and present, Caravaggio to Warhol, all shown against black backgrounds dressed in identical black V-neck T-shirts. The mesmerizing installation surrounds the Correr’s precious wooden sculpture of Madonna della Misericordia. Jenny Saville also shows masterful, monumental portraits at the baroque marble palace, Ca’ Pesaro, and debuts a cycle inspired by Venice. It is, arguably, this season’s most painterly presentation in the city.
Principe. Il Nottambulo del Pensiero Magmatico
Also in St. Mark’s Square is Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990): Emballage, Cricotage and Madame Jarema, at the Procuratie Vecchie, which once housed the Procurators of St. Marks, administrators of the nearby basilica’s funds. Two pivotal Polish avant-gardists, Kantor and Jarema epitomize the wonderful weirdness that always animates corners of the Biennale.
Tadeusz Kantor, Emballage, Cricotage and Madame Jarema
What does Yoko Ono have to do with Saudi Arabia? At the historic Abbey of St, Gregorio, in Dorsoduro, that nation’s show, A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World, uses multiple international artists and medieval and historical maps to illuminate how humanity uses rendering to control the world. Oh no!
Though it’s well-known, the nearby Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s current show focuses on many lesser-known works its founder collected in London while launching her career as a gallerist, such as the Russian-born avant-garde modernist Marie Vassilieff’s puppet, L’Architecte, inspired by Le Corbusier.
Marie Vassilieff’s puppet, L’Architecte
Vyacheslav Akhunov: Instruments of the Mind in San Marco’s Venetian Gothic Palazzo Franchetti on the Grand Canal has an eerie beauty. Viennese artist Erwin Wurms’ Dreamers at the Museo Fortuny reduces people to the clothes they wear in a series of sculptures that are as laugh-out-loud funny as they are strangely beautiful. At the Palazzo Rota Ivancich, an evocative gathering place for artists and writers like Ernest Hemingway in the last Century, We Thought We Were Alone, an investigation into hybridity by Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen is a mashup of the classical and animalistic expressions of humanity. Elsewhere at the Biennale, the word queer is mostly political. At all these shows, it reverts to its original meaning.
The 15th Century Palazzo Pisani Moretta now houses the Dries van Noten Foundation, founded by the Belgian fashion star, so an exhibit that includes clothes is hardly unusual, but what surrounds them is. The only true protest is beauty, named with a lyric by the Sixties protest singer Phil Ochs, purposely juxtaposes couture and fantastic jewelry with objects, furniture and the building’s ceilings, frescoes, portraits and architectural details, evoking, the creative spirit that endures in Venice.
Anish Kapoor’s foundation has similarly taken over the 16th Century Palazzo Manfrin in Cannareggio and installed architectural models of projects both completed and still unrealized spanning 50 years of the artist’s work, beside large-scale pieces, many in stainless-steel, that seems to beg you to take selfies.
After all that art, it’s good to get off your feet and enjoy a perfect unpressured meal. In matters culinary, Venice can be as surprising as it is for art-lovers. Two finds in Dorsoduro stood out as much for their simple design and laid-back atmosphere as superior food: Oniga on Campo San Barnaba, and Do Farai, a few block away on Calle dei Cappeller, an old osteria now reinvented by a member of the noble Brandolini family, both serve perfectly rendered unfussy Venetian classics. They’re effective treatments for an art overdose.
