A Quartet of Exhibitions at the Pinault Collection in Venice

As the art world descends on Venice this summer, politics seems to follow suit. From the jury disbanding to protests around pavilions, there was a lot of spectacle and even more opinion. At the Pinault Collection, both the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, the political is also on view, but through the lens of established, reflective and poignant voices of four artists who “develop singular universes capable of connecting individual narratives, collective histories, and contemporary representations, while also fostering meaningful dialogues between cultures and sensibilities,” as Jean-Marie Gallais, curator of the Pinault Collection writes.

A ‘quartet’ of exhibitions featuring Michael Armitage, Amar Kanwar, Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth reflect the Pinault Collection’s belief that contemporary art offers a “privileged space for understanding and reflecting on our times;” this is the first time they are presenting four artists to simultaneously occupy the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in an unprecedented way. “From East Africa, India, North America, and Brazil, these artists each bring a distinct perspective on the world, rooted in specific cultural and political contexts. Working across painting, film, installation, and photography, they give form to works in which memory, history, and present experience intersect, revealing the multiple dimensions of contemporary societies.”

At the Palazzo Grassi, Michael Armitage: “The Promise of Change,” is an in-depth exhibition curated by Jean-Marie Gallais in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Director, Serpentine Galleries. Forty-five paintings, including newly created pieces for the show, and over 100 studies, reveal Armitage’s powerful, at times brutal imagery that emerges from the canvas in a swirl of colour, shape and form. He paints with oil on a traditional bark cloth sourced from Uganda and Indonesia, giving the paintings a rough, textural surface. The large, vertical painting, Pathos and the twilight of the idle, 2019, is installed under one of the Palazzo’s historic cupulas, the deep greens and gold of the 15th century ceiling resonating resonate within the golds and greens of Armitage’s painting; histories unfolding, past and present. As Bruno Racine writes: “Armitage draws on myths as well as current events, on individual stories as well as collective and migratory movements, and on the realities of his native Kenya as well as Western art history, always with extraordinarily evocative power.”

On the second floor of the Palazzo Grassi are two multimedia installations films by the New Delhi-based artist Amar Kanwar. Titled “Co-Travellers,” and curated by Jean Marie Gallais, the first installation, The Torn First Pages (2004-2008), documents the complexity of the struggle for democracy in Myanmar (Burma). This piece “is the result of Kanwar’s characteristic practice of collecting, synthesizing and redeploying archival documents.” In a totally dark space in the central room of the Palazzo, Kanwar presents The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023), seven screens of image and text that weave together. Shown together, the installations create a dialogue between the two works, made twenty-years apart, providing a “poetic and politic meditation on human nature, justice and injustice, and, as Kanwar states, “on the consequences of arrogance of our species.”

At the Punta della Dogana, “Lorna Simpson: Third Person” curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director and General Curator of the Pinault Collection, and organised in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of the largest presentations of Simpson’s painting practice in Europe, in more than a decade. The selection of paintings was conceived specifically for the Punta della Dogana space, highlighting this body of work that the artist has been steadily developing since the mid-2010s, including several paintings created for the 2015 Venice Biennale that was curated by Okwui Enwezor. Also on view is a comprehensive selection of collage work that brings insight into her creative process that is rooted in experimentation, free association and juxtaposition. Emma Lavigne writes: “Even as she draws from the great art historical genres – portraiture, landscape, and history painting – Simpson’s pictorial work has been breaking new ground for the past decade. Using archival images that she screenprints, then transforms through superimposition and overlay, she brings forth other presences, putting visual art into dialogue with writing.”

Concurrently on view on the upper floor of the Punta della Dogna, is “Algebra,” a solo exhibition of work by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth. Curated by Fernanda Brenner, the exhibition spans twenty-years of his career and featuring several pieces from the Pinault Collection, as well as many previously unseen works. Under the old wooden beams and faded brick walls of this former customs house, “Algebra,” which comes from the Arabic word “al-jabr,” the setting of broken bones, features photographs, sculptures, videos connected to the artist’s walking practice, including a 10-month walk he made from Brazil to New York. “Photographs, texts and worn-out Havaianas trace moments where identity and borders collide, offering a firsthand account of migration as both lived experience and constructed fiction.” A line of salt runs throughout the exhibition, “a threshold between what is visible and what remains submerged.”

Four publications, in different formats, accompany each exhibition, each conceived and curated by the Dutch designer Irma Boom. Among the authors contributing to these books include Manthia Diawara, Gabriela de Matos, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Johny Pitts, Philippe Rekacewicz, Salman Rushdie and Ocean Vuong.

Palazzo Grassi: March 29-November 22nd 2026

Michael Armitage, “The Promise of Change”

Amar Kanwar, “Co-Travellers”

Punta della Dogana: March 29-November 22nd 2026

Lorna Simpson, “Third Person”

Paulo Nazareth, “Algebra”

Pinault Collection

@palazzo_grassi

Opening image credit: (from left to right) Michael Armitage, Conjestina, 2017, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; Curfew, (Likoni March 27 2020), 2022, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Gift of Ronnie Heyman in honor of Ann Temkin. Acc. no.: 768.2022; Necklacing, 2016, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Gioconda King, by exchange, 2018 (2018.937).
Installation view Marco Cappelletti Studio.