Venice, a retrospective dedicated to Raoul Schultz at Ca' Pesaro, with more than fifty works

The Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice is devoting a retrospective exhibition in the Dom Pérignon Rooms until June 8, 2025 to Raoul Schultz (Leros, Aegean 1931 - Venice, 1971), among the most innovative artists of his time. Raoul Schultz. Works 1953-1970, curated by Stefano Cecchetto and Elisabetta Barisoni, traces in aconcise anthology the artist’s production from 1953 to 1970 through more than fifty works from both the Venetian Gallery’s holdings - such as New Structures 1665 - and private collections.

The exhibition path begins with his first participations in the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Collectives, in which Schultz devoted himself to the figurative representation of Venetian architecture, and then reaches the more mature experiences of Curved Perspectives and New Structures in the early 1960s. It was during this period that his deep friendship with Tancredi was born, with whom he shared a studio at Palazzo Carminati, a decisive moment for both of them in defining an original artistic language.

Schultz is distinguished by a creative path that is not linear but rich in experimentation. A painter, illustrator, graphic designer and set designer, he often returns to drawing, notes, erasures and conceptual works, such as Anonymous Letters, Leonardesque Projects and Toponomastics. Surrealism runs through his entire oeuvre, intertwining with Dadaist suggestions and influences from behavioral art to the deconstruction of visual language.

Gifted with a natural interdisciplinary inclination, Schultz explores multiple expressive languages: from comics to cinema, from the new media of the time to assemblage, to the recovery of collage. His contaminations with literature, illustration and cinema lead him to forge important collaborations and friendships with screenwriter and editor Kim Arcalli, writers Alberto Ongaro and Goffredo Parise. He frequented Hugo Pratt and director Tinto Brass, for whom, in 1963, he made the sets for the film Chi lavora è perduto.

“The exhibition is part of the programmatic desire of the International Gallery of Modern Art of Venice to enhance and rediscover works and authors from its civic collections and, through these, to suggest the reconstruction of lesser-known moments in the history of Italian art,” explains Elisabetta Barisoni, director Area Musei - Ca’ Pesaro and Museo Fortuny. “According to this programmatic line, an exhibition dedicated to an author such as Raoul Schultz, who has long disappeared from the radar of major national exhibitions and yet to be included among the innovators of the arts in the lagoon in the period from the 1950s to the 1960s, seems necessary today. There are numerous connections that Schultz’s articulate yet highly original production suggests, starting with the work that first entered the Ca’ Pesaro collections, New Structures 1665, 1965 acquired at the 53rd Bevilacqua La Masa Collective Exhibition in 1965. What emerges from the exhibition is a portrait of an artist who represented the course of a generation just after the middle one.”

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Venice, a retrospective dedicated to Raoul Schultz at Ca' Pesaro, with more than fifty works

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