Show Notes
It’s Venice Biennale opening week and so, as ever, this episode is our Venice special. The Biennale comprises many aspects: an international exhibition that this year features more than 100 artists in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini—Venice’s easternmost gardens—and the Arsenale, the historic Venetian shipyards, as well as national pavilions and, across the city, countless official collateral exhibitions alongside major museum shows, performances and other interventions. We bring you our immediate impressions of this year’s offering: Louisa Buck, Jane Morris and host Ben Luke review the main exhibition, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and realised by five of her collaborators. Ben talks to two artists: Gabrielle Goliath whose work for the South African pavilion was cancelled and is being staged in a church in the heart of Venice, and Lubaina Himid, who is showing in the British pavilion in the Giardini. He also meets the writer and thinker Saidiya Hartman, two of whose essays have inspired a production called Minor Music at the End of the World, staged at Venice’s Goldoni Theatre and featuring contributions from, among others, the artists Arthur Jafa, Precious Okoyomon and Okwui Okpokwaseli. And The Art Newspaper’s digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to Daniella Kaliada, one of the team behind Official. Unofficial. Belarus., a collateral art project by Belarus Free Theatre. Finally, we always end our Venice specials with a historic masterpiece, and in this episode’s Work of the Week, we look at two: Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Last Supper and The Israelites in the Desert of 1591-92, the pair of paintings made for the presbytery of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. The paintings have just returned to the basilica after a major conservation project, funded by the charity Save Venice, and Ben spoke to Save Venice’s Senior Researcher, Gabriele Matino, about them.
In Minor Keys, 9 May-22 November Gabrielle Goliath: Elegy, Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, 5 May-31 July Predicting History: Testing Translation, British Pavilion, 9 May-22 November Official. Unofficial. Belarus., Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista di Venezia, 9 May-22 November Visit savevenice.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Week in Art
It’s Frieze week in London, and as usual we take the opportunity to take the temperature of the market in London, and more widely, at the fair. Joining Ben Luke in the tent in Regent’s Park is The Art Newspaper’s art market editor, Kabir Jhala. At Tate Modern, the annual commission for the Turbine Hall is Hold, a work by the Beirut-born artist Tarek Atoui, and Ben visits Tate Modern to talk to him. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Francesco di Giorgio’s Deposition of Christ from the Cross with a Group of Donors (Federico da Montefeltro and His Family), a bronze relief made in 1473–74. It is one of the highlights of an exhibition that opened this week at The Frick in New York, Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500. Ben talks to the curator of the exhibition, Giulio Dalvit.
Saturday, 10 October, marks the first anniversary of the ceasefire in Gaza. It has not put an end to the bloodshed, with figures released in August by the United Nations Human Rights Office stating that more than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since last October. The Art Newspaper’s reporter Sarvy Geranpayeh has been reporting on the lives of Palestinian artists since soon after the first Israeli bombings in Gaza in October 2023, following the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October. She joins Ben Luke to discuss her latest conversations with four Gazan artists who have all experienced different levels of trauma, grief and displacement. A stunning new survey exhibition of the work of the US painter Robert Ryman opened this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, and Ben visits the gallery to talk to Wells Fray-Smith, the exhibition’s curator. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Great Room (2020-ongoing) by the US artist Katherine Hubbard, the latest iteration of which was unveiled this week at Studio Voltaire in London. The Great Room responds through different forms of photographic work to the effects of LATE, a progressive brain disease, on Hubbard’s mother Antonette Berger, and the emotional experience of packing up a home in preparation for a move into residential care. Ben talks to Katherine about the work.
The French painter Auguste Renoir continues to divide critical opinion, something acknowledged by the curators of the new exhibition, Renoir and Love, at the National Gallery in London. But he remains enormously popular: the Gallery announced ahead of the show that it had broken records for advanced ticket sales. So what does the exhibition tell us about Renoir’s place in the radical developments in art in Paris between the 1860s and 1880s? Ben Luke visits the National Gallery to talk to Chiara di Stefano, its co-curator. In Belgium, the long-awaited Kanal Brussels, the museum of modern and contemporary art and architecture, established and funded by the Brussels-Capital Region and housed in a spectacular former Citroën garage, has become a political football, with debates over its future funding. Ben speaks to Senay Boztas, The Art Newspaper’s correspondent based in Amsterdam, about the latest developments. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Seated Sarong Figure (1938) by Ronald Moody. The work features in an exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in Twickenham, London, called Sculpting Life. Ben talks to the artist and curator Kedisha Coakley, who has made a new film about Moody for the exhibition.
At the Grand Palais in Paris a new exhibition explores Paul Cezanne’s influence on artists from his own time to now. In Paris, Ben Luke speaks to Xavier Rey, the director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, who is one of four curators of the exhibition, Cezanne and Us. In New York, the Guggenheim has just opened Taryn Simon’s latest project, called Father Country I Do Love You. It is the first solo exhibition by an artist whose principal medium is photography to be staged in the museum’s celebrated rotunda and, remarkably, the largest display of new work ever staged at the Guggenheim. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Ben Sutton, speaks to Taryn Simon about the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is René Magritte’s Le Plaisir (Pleasure) (1946), a gouache on paper which is part of an exhibition at Gagosian in London called This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte. The exhibition’s co-curator is Jasper Sharp and our digital editor, Alexander Morrison, went to the gallery to talk to him.
After a four-year restoration, the Bardi Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, in which Giotto depicted scenes from the life of St Francis of Assisi in the early 14th century, has reopened. Ben Luke talks to Emanuela Daffra, superintendent of the Opficio delle Pietre Dure, which conserves Italian heritage, and Donata Grossoni, art historian at the Opera di Santa Croce, about the work and the project to restore it. The 18th edition of the Biennale de Lyon called To pass from one dream to another, opens on Saturday, across France’s third largest city. This edition has been devised by the Australian-born, Berlin-based curator Catherine Nichols, and Ben speaks to her about the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Juggler (The Magician) by Remedios Varo, made in Mexico City in 1956. The painting is one of more than 70 works by the Spanish-born Surrealist in the first major survey of her work in Europe, which begins this week at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk in Denmark, and travels to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm next year. Ben speaks to Tere Arcq, the co-curator of the exhibition, about the painting.