Beyond the Biennale
Raqib Shaw:
Palazzo della Memoria Ca’ Pesaro, Venice 22 April–25 September www.capesaro.visitmuve.it
With this new suite of 12 paintings, the London-based artist has drawn on Venetian masters to create lavish fusions of biography and history; pictured is an adaptation of Giorgione’s Tempest incorporating scenes from south London and Kashmir.
Danh Vo, Isamu Noguchi, Park Seo-Bo
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
20 April–27 November www.querinistampalia.org
Co-curated by Vietnamese sculptor Danh Vo and Chiara Bertola, this show juxtaposes Vo’s poignant installations with the paintings of Korean modernist Park and Noguchi’s famous Akari lamps (pictured).
The Soul Expanding Ocean #3 & #4
Ocean Space, Venice 9 April–2 October www.ocean-space.org
New commissions from the South African conceptual artist Dineo Seshee Bopape and the Lisbon-based audiovisual artist Diana Policarpo (pictured) reflect on the social, cultural and natural history of the sea.
Joseph Beuys: Fine-Limbed Palazzo Cini, Venice
20 April–2 October www.palazzocini.it
Forty works by the German artist-shaman, dating from the late 1940s and early ’50s, revealing how he conceived of both the human body and the symbolic meaning of animals, are on show here among the Cini’s historic Italian paintings.
Marlene Dumas: open-end Palazzo Grassi, Venice 27 March–8 January 2023 www.palazzograssi.it
‘I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-hand emotions,’ Marlene Dumas has said of her work. The phrase neatly sums up the essential contradiction of the South African’s art. Her oil paintings and ink drawings, most often taking the form of portraits, are in one sense timeless – they convey, in a visceral, expressionist manner, universal human experiences of suffering and joy, fear and eroticism. But through her incorporation of images drawn from newspapers and magazines, films and the artist’s own Polaroid snaps, Dumas also gives her works a specific historical resonance.
With more than 100 works, dating from 1984 to the present, this retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi – which draws from the Pinault Collection’s substantial holdings as well as loans from international museums – is one of the artist’s largest museum shows to date, and the most sustained exploration of a contemporary artist’s career to be found in Venice this year. It extends from Dumas’s early collages and text-based pieces to more recent works in oil and ink. Some of these reinvent famous portraits of the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Dora Maar and Marilyn Monroe; some pay homage to art-historical figures such as Michelangelo. With others, Dumas sets her sights squarely on the present moment – a close-up iPhone (2018) captures the impersonality of contemporary media consumption. Others still, like Smoke (pictured; 2018), are at once anonymous and unnervingly intimate.