After years of pandemic-induced shutdown, travel is back in 2022. And so are music festivals, gatherings and yes, the major art shows. The Venice Biennale, naturally, is among them. And let’s be honest. If you are going to dip your toe back in the art show pool, is there a better city than Venice? I think not!

THE RED AND BLACK WORLD OF ANISH KAPOOR

Going to Venice, especially when one has limited amount of time, requires making choices. Do you brave the crowds at the Arsenale and Giardini and see lots of art but little Venice proper? Or, do you explore the many installations that are sprinkled throughout the city and play tourist in-between? I chose the latter.

First stop: Anish Kapoor. His work is shown at two Venetian venues: The Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia in Dorsoduro and at the historic Palazzo Manfrin in Cannaregio. An in-built sight-seeing! Starting in the Dorsoduro gallery courtyard, you’re greeted by a familiar sight, one of Kapoor’s large scale mirrors. Yes, you have come to the right place. Enter the building, however, and a darker Kapoor emerges. It’s here where you encounter the never-before seen Vantablack sculptures. Vantablack is a ground-breaking nano-technology material that absorbs more than 99.8% of visible light, allowing Kapoor to create forms that both appear and disappear before your eyes. According to the gallery, Kapoor’s work probes the idea of darkness as a physical and psychic reality. In life outside the gallery walls, the use of Vantablack also poses some ethical questions about whether a single artist should be the only one with access to this new material. Many disagree.

In addition to the black forms, there are other earlier pigment works, many relying on blood red, rather evocative presentation. Walking through, I definitely felt uneasy. Definitely not art for the squeamish.

From Dorsoduro, weave your way through the winding canals of Venice (if you are lucky, you might pass a little Banksy on the way) to the charmingly delapidated Palazzo Manfrin. This venue impresses right at the entrance. Walk in and you are met with the monumental new work “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto” protruding from the ceiling. From there, move on to other rooms to explore a triptych of seething silicone paintings, “Internal Objects in Three Parts”, as well as other influential works from Kapoor’s career.

Move through the rooms to find more iconic mirror works that flip and distort the viewer’s expectations of what is before us, ponder the artist’s geometrical works carved from natural alabaster and admire the blue pigment of Kapoor’s early void hemispheres that bring to mind another artist - Yves Klein and his own blue.

In the palazzo’s courtyard, stop by Kapoor’s mechanized work. The spinning red waters of “Turning Water Into Mirror, Blood Into Sky” have a distinctly mesmerizing quality.

BRUCE NAUMAN AT PUNTA DELLA DOGANA AND MARLENE DUMAS AT PALAZZO GRASSI

OK. I will let you in on my secret. This show made it on the shortlist first and foremost because I hadn’t seen Tadao Ando’s renovated Punta Della Dogana gallery during my last visit and I wasn’t going to miss it this time. I am glad I saw it. I love the simple gallery design that creates spaces that breathe and door and window treatments that let in intriguing glimpses of the city and the passersby.

The show at Punta della Dogana highlights both older works and some recent ones and focuses on video installations that Nauman has developed over the last years related to a single channel video from 1968, “Walk with Contrapposto”, in which we see the artist walk in a narrow wooden corridor built inside his studio while trying to maintain the contrapposto pose. If I am honest, however, I liked the Marlene Dumas show at Palazzo Grassi a bit better.

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Palazzo Grassi is showing a major monographic exhibition dedicated to Marlene Dumas. The artist’s paintings and drawings, some of them quite in-your-face, were created between 1984 and today. They provoke a range of emotions, from fear and suffering to ecstasy. A few will make you uncomfortable, forcing you to question the world and human relationships around us. But overall, you will be glad you saw the show.

THE (DISAPPOINTING) LUCIO FONTANA AND ANTHONY GORMLEY

Don’t get me wrong. I love both artists and their work. And I was truly looking forward to seeing the show. Unfortunately, in this case, the location did not live up to expectations. Tucked away under the archways surrounding Piazza San Marco, the gallery came with the extra excitement produced by a geyser of water streaming out of the store next door as the piazza was partially covered by water, forcing us to abandon plans to raise a glass at the Florian. The inside of the former Olivetti showroom where the show was held was fortunately dry, but the busy (if interesting) interior did not let the art breathe. Great works, from small sketches and sculptures by Gormley to a few iconic Fontana pieces, were lost in the busy space. I still liked the works, but wished that the curators arranged things differently.

THE (CUTE) AND NON-BIENNALE RELATED ART OF BLUB

Those who know me have come to expect seeing some street art in my posts. And, this being Italy, I was delighted to notice a former Florentine discovery in Venice. Blub (or “Art knows how to swim”) has gained notoriety by creating copies of famous paintings (think Mona Lisa) with the characters “submerged” under water and wearing diving goggles. I loved them when I first saw them a few years back and coming across a couple pieces in Venice was no different. In a way, the “swimming” art fits here even better!

We’ve seen several other shows, including Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim museum and the three-artist show: Danh Vo, Isamu Noguchi, and Park Seo-Bo at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, but perhaps I will cover those later. Now, I am curious about what your favorite shows were! Tell me in the comments. I would love to hear from you.