At last—Venice. For the first time since 2019, La Biennale is on view in the Most Serene Republic.
Cecilia Alemani, the chief curator of High Line Art in New York, is at the helm of this, the 59th edition, and she has organized a central exhibition that is a feast of breathtaking proportions. Titled “The Milk of Dreams,” after a children’s book by the artist Leonora Carrington, it includes 213 artists across the show’s two traditional locations, the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale.
The vast majority of them identify as female or gender-nonconforming—a thrilling change of pace. There are young guns, revered veterans, and historical figures (famous and obscure), many of the latter tucked into five historical sections through which Alemani charts the themes of her endeavor.
Surrealist energies course through the show, and bodies are everywhere—fantastical, disfigured, augmented, mechanized, mythological, objectified, and monumental. This is art that embodies resilience, and that knows the alchemical power of stories, and dreams, and even a bit of escapism through spectacle (or sex).
A fertile-smelling mound of soil by Delcy Morelos emanates the scents of cocoa powder and tobacco, tortured but tough organs by Mire Lee secrete frightening liquids, and sugarcane grows in a seductive environment by Precious Okoyomon. A hard-won and by no means naïve optimism reigns. These are difficult times, the exhibition seems to say, but there have been difficult times before, and artists keep going.
Below, a first look through the exhibition.
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Cosima von Bonin
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews What is that atop the Central Pavilion in the Giardini? A brigade of Cosima von Bonin’s undersea creatures in all their glory! One brandishes a guitar, while another chomps a missile. They announce the mayhem that awaits inside, and suggest a world where suddenly anything is possible.
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Katharina Fritsch
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Inside, Katharina Fritsch’s Elephant (1987)—of polyester, wood, and paint—greets all-comers. Eerily lifelike and shockingly surreal, it looks a bit forlorn up there on its pedestal, all alone. It is a stand-in for any number of elephants in the room.
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Andra Ursuta and Rosemarie Trockel
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Alemani’s exhibition delivers juxtapositions that are as potent as one-two punches. Here, glass sculptures by Andra Ursuta are flanked by the knitted works of Rosemarie Trockel: hard and soft, abstraction and figuration, sturdy and fragile.
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Simone Fattal
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Charismatic sculptures by the artist Simone Fattal stand in the Central Pavilion’s Carlo Scarpa–designed courtyard. They appear to be coming together as we watch, and though they are barely legible, they are vulnerable, welcoming, and somehow knowable.
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Bronwyn Katz and Amy Sillman
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Another formidable pairing comes in a sculpture of bedsprings, titled Gõegõe (2022), by Bronwyn Katz, and a sprawling suite of paintings by Amy Sillman, whose forms are multiplying, moving, collapsing, and growing, always in flux.
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Louise Lawler
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews You will be hard-pressed to find male artists in the Central Pavilion, but in a series of Louise Lawler photographs, Donald Judd sculptures sit inside New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the dark, as they did for so much of the pandemic. Alluring and sepulchral, they seem to embody a now-vanished vision of the future, and yet there is something charged and alive in these strange, utterly unforgettable photos.
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Jadé Fadojutimi
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews The British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, who is 30 next year, is showing a trio of new paintings that are explosively colorful and action-packed but also sly, nuanced, and spectral. They just keep coming.
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Jana Euler
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews More sharks! There are 111 of them, to be exact. The handiwork of the wily mid-career German artist Jana Euler, they are ceramics and titled—wait for it—great white fear (2021). They are frightening, pathetic, quite phallic, and anxious for attention. Behind them, a new Euler painting presents a body turning itself inside-out, a skin waiting to be slipped on.
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Elaine Cameron-Weir
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews A suite of works by Elaine Cameron-Weir have their own gallery the Central Pavilion. Two gray cases used by the U.S. military for transporting bodily remains support soaring banners in this metal-floored room. It is an environment for sci-fi rituals with bracing relevance for the present moment.
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Hannah Levy and Kaari Upson
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Razor-sharp, body-ache-inducing sculptures by Hannah Levy sit before rough and tender paintings by the late, great Kaari Upson, who died last year at just 51.
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Simone Leigh
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews The Arsenale section of the main show opens with Simone Leigh’s soaring Brick House (2019), which once delighted viewers on the High Line in New York. It is surrounded now by a bevy of Belkis Ayón’s captivating symbol-rich print works.
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Gabriel Chaile
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews A gargantuan clay sculpture by the Argentinan artist Gabriel Chaile was one of the finest moments in the New Museum’s recent triennial. For Venice, Chaile has created a quintet of them—hybrid beings that suggest animals, functional tools, and pre-Columbian sculptures. They entrance.
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Teresa Solar
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Shimmering, smooth sculptures by Teresa Solar, of Spain, could be archaeological remains of some alien species, or perhaps creatures just beyond the reach of human observation (or imagination). Behind them are paintings by the indefatigably venturesome Jamian Juliano-Villani, whose deranged mashed-up paintings can deliver biting punchlines and lingering existential revelations.
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Kiki Kogelnik and Anne Coleman Ladd
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Here’s one of Alemani’s historical rooms, titled “Seduction of the Cyborg.” It is a Wunderkammer of an effort that includes everything from the neon-radiating paintings of Kiki Kogelnik to a facial prosthetic that the sculptor Anne Coleman Ladd made for a soldier injured during World War I.
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Tau Lewis
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Tau Lewis has assembled this piece—Angelus Mortem (2021)—from recycled fur, and fashioned a mask with astonishing presence. It is a masterclass in how an artwork becomes more than the sum of its parts. It can see right through you.
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Marianna Simnett
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Brave art lovers enter Marianna Simnett’s video installation The Severed Tail (2022), a discomfiting (but not unpleasurable) foray in a fetish world where humans roleplay as animals. They seem to be having a good time, even when they are in pain. You will, too.
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Mire Lee
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Remember this name: the Korean artist Mire Lee, who works in Amsterdam, is displaying kinetic sculptures that suggest organs being tortured in a hell of incredible grotesqueries. They secrete pigmented glycerine, and though they are likely to make you wince, you will still want to spend plenty of time with them.
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Barbara Kruger
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Barbara Kruger—fresh off her barnburner of a survey at the Art Institute of Chicago (now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)—has delivered a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling installation—a delirious cacophony of texts about desire, bodies, patriotism, and all the good and (more so) bad that those things can do.
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Delcy Morelos
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews One of the best-smelling artworks I have ever encountered comes via Bogotá–based artist Delcy Morelos. She has built a sprawling minimal sculpture of soil and clay spiked with cocoa powder, cassava starch, tobacco, and more. It alludes to Andean and Amerindian cosmologies, and is titled, perfectly enough, Earthly Paradise (2022).
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Ruth Asawa
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews A hanging garden of sculptures by the unrivaled Ruth Asawa i included in another historical room in the show, called “A Leaf a Gourd a Shell a Net a Bag a Sling a Sack a Bottle a Pot a Box a Container.” The title alludes to a line from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”
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Sandra Mujinga
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Sandra Mujinga, who was born in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and who lives in Oslo and Berlin, cloaks an Arsenale room in green light to display foreboding sculptures that feel at once prehistoric and futuristic. The mood is tense, as though silent forces are gaining strength, blithely uninterested in your presence.
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Robert Grosvenor
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Robert Grosvenor, the New York legend who is 85 this year, has contributed a trio of beguiling sculptures. Here is Block of Water (2019), a reflecting pool constructed from just concrete blocks and rubber liner: workaday materials coming together to make a serene and oddly timeless object. (Some may recall it alighting at Karma in Manhattan’s East Village in 2020, just before the pandemic arrived.)
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Precious Okoyomon
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews The main Arsenale section concludes with this tour de force from Precious Okoyomon, To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), a fantastical environment of stones and dirt, kudzu and sugarcane—living things interwoven with centuries of history, and of stories of migration (forced, hopeful, accidental). The mood is buoyant, even optimistic: Okoyomon is shaping a landscape, charting the course of a river.
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Aki Sasamoto
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews The great Aki Sasamoto (who has to be one of the most underrated artists working today) has served up a delightfully bewildering environment—a kind of madcap restaurant kitchen—in which snail shells glide around what appear to be an air-hockey tables. Its title suggests a deadly serious message beneath the chaos: Sink or Float (2022). Let us hope this becomes one of the breakout hits of the show.
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Simone Leigh
Image Credit: Andrew Russeth for ARTnews Tucked away in a back garden of the Arsenale is one more Simone Leigh sculpture, golden and resplendent. Cupboard (2022), it’s called.