In 2022 in Venice a major retrospective devoted to Anish Kapoor in two venues

The Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice announces a major exhibition dedicated to Anish Kapoor (Mumbai, India, 1954) to be held from April 20 to October 9, 2022, in conjunction with the next International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. According to the announcement, the exhibition will be a retrospective tracing the highlights of the celebrated artist’s career; it will also feature previously unseen works. In fact, for the first time, the highly innovative new works, created using carbon nanotechnology, will be on display, as well as recent paintings and sculptures that testify to the vitality and visionary drive of the master’s current artistic output.

The exhibition, curated by Taco Dibbits, will be staged at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and in the historic Palazzo Manfrin, in Venice’s Cannaregio district, to whose collection originally belonged a significant nucleus of masterpieces now on display inside the museum. Purchased in 1788 by Count Girolamo Manfrin, a wealthy tobacco merchant, who had turned the second floor of the building into an art gallery, Palazzo Manfrin was considered for its collection of paintings, as well as sculptures, books and prints, a sort of complement to the heritage of Venetian painting exhibited at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Indeed, the Gallery had become a major tourist attraction in Venice, visited by Antonio Canova, Lord Byron, John Ruskin, and Edouard Manet, among others. When, around the middle of the nineteenth century, the works in the collection were sold, after Manfrin’s death, the holdings of the Gallerie dell’Accademia were enriched by of twenty-one paintings, including some of its greatest masterpieces, such as Giorgione’s La Tempesta and La Vecchia, Andrea Mantegna ’s St. George and Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Young Man, Nicolò di Pietro’s Madonna Enthroned with Child and a Devotee, Girolamo Savoldo’s Saints Paul and Anthony Hermits, and St. Peter and St. John the Baptist by Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto.

Kapoor’s choice of Palazzo Manfrin as the home of his art foundation, whose restoration project was entrusted to architect Giulia Foscari (UNA/FWR Associati), is significant because of the palace’s connection to the Galleries, which represent the most important collection of Venetian and Veneto art in the world. In this perspective, the works of one of the greatest contemporary artists are connected to a precise artistic context of important experiences and references, reviving the history of Venice and its pictorial tradition, which Anish Kapoor constantly draws on as a source of inspiration and creativity.

“It is a great honor to be invited to confront the collections of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice; perhaps one of the finest collections of classical painting in the whole world,” Kapoor said. “All art must always confront what has gone before. The Gallerie dell’Accademia presents a wonderful and amazing challenge. I feel a deep connection with Venice, it’s architecture and its vocation for contemporary art.”

“Kapoor, by virtue of his original and profound researches on color, light, perspective and space,” comments Giulio Manieri Elia, director of the Galleries, “goes to the very root of the principles of Venetian Renaissance painting, investigates its essence and manages to dialogue intimately on an ideal - we could even say conceptual - level with the work of Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog published by Marsilio Arte.

Image: Anish Kapoor, Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013; steel, wax, conveyor belts; dimensions variable). Photo by Dave Morgan ©Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved SIAE, 2021

In 2022 in Venice a major retrospective devoted to Anish Kapoor in two venues

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