2016 New Exhibitions at Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi Venezia

PUNTA DELLA DOGANA  FROM 17 APRL TO 20 NOVEMBER  2016
“Accrochage” is an experiment based on a single, simple rule: select eighty works, which have never been shown since they became part of the Pinault Collection and underline the artist’s search and creative process, not the work’s aesthetic. In other words, “Accrochage” focuses on how rather than why these works were created.
The selection reflects the Pinault Collection as a whole and brings together established and up-and-coming artists: from Sol LeWitt to Prabhavathi Meppayil, from Philippe Parreno to Cerith Wyn Evans, from Pierre Huyghe to Nina Canell, to name but a few. Notwithstanding their radical diversity, these works share a formal simplicity, a suppressed tension that amplify the space of the other, that is of the spectators. This freedom given by the exhibits is the aim of this exhibition. Its title “Accrochage” (hanging-up) is deliberately neutral, unobtrusive and delivers a simple, direct message: look!

PALAZZO GRASSI  FROM 17 APRIL TO 06 NOVEMBER 2016 
“Sigmar Polke”, curated by Elena Geuna and Guy Tosatto in collaboration with the Estate of Sigmar Polke, marks the 10th anniversary of the reopening of Palazzo Grassi.
In 1986, Sigmar Polke was awarded the Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice Biennale. With Athanor, his project for the German Pavilion, the artist developed techniques and motifs that would become central to his work, and which today, 30 years later constitute the thematic core of the exhibition: alchemic experimentation and political anxiety.
The exhibition at Palazzo Grassi follows a reverse chronological order and opens in the atrium with Axial Age, the artist’s last important pictorial cycle, created between 2005 and 2007. The 90 works on display surveys the eclectic production of the artist from the 2000s to the 1960s. His work intertwines the alchemical and the political, through continuous references to contemporary and ancient history. By bringing together the abstract and the figurative, past and present, the creativity of Sigmar Polke shapes an idiosyncratic, wide-ranging and manifold world.