March 24, 2019–January 6, 2020
March 24–December 15, 2019
San Samuele 3231
Venice
Italy
La Pelle
Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Luc Tuymans
Palazzo Grassi, Venice
Palazzo Grassi presents the exhibition La Pelle, Luc Tuymans’ first personal exhibition in Italy.
Curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with the artist (Mortsel, Belgium, 1958), the show is entitled La Pelle (The Skin), after Curzio Malaparte’s 1949 novel. It includes over 80 works from the Pinault Collection, international museums and private collections, and focuses on the artist’s paintings from 1986 to today.
Considered as one of the most influential painters of the international art scene, Luc Tuymans has been dedicating himself to figurative painting since the mid 1980s and has contributed throughout his career to the rebirth of this medium in contemporary art. His works deal with questions connected to the past and to more recent history and address subjects of our daily lives through a set of images borrowed from the private and public spheres—the press, television, the Internet. The artist renders these images by dissolving them in an unusual and rarefied light; the slight anxiety that emanates from them is able to trigger—according to the artist himself—an “authentic forgery” of reality.
The exhibition project corresponds to the eighth “carte blanche” given by the Pinault Collection to its artists as an invitation to conceive major monographic exhibitions presented in Venice. Luc Tuymans also unveils a site-specific work, conceived for the atrium of Palazzo Grassi: a marble mosaic of over 80 square meters which reproduces Schwarzheide, an artwork painted in 1986 by the artist.
Luogo e Segni
Curated by Mouna Mekouar, Martin Bethenod
Punta della Dogana, Venice
Luogo e Segni, conceived by Mouna Mekouar, independent curator, and Martin Bethenod, Director of Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, is the seventh exhibition to be presented at Punta della Dogana from its opening as an exhibition space of the Pinault Collection, ten years ago, in 2009.
Named after an artwork by Carol Rama displayed in the exhibition, Luogo e Segni presents over 100 works by 36 artists, among whom 17 are presented for the first time in a Pinault Collection exhibition in Venice. Among those, three have taken part in the artist residency programme promoted by the Pinault Collection in Lens.
Luogo e Segni is an itinerary through some inner geography where nature, creation and poetry intertwine, and draws particular inspiration from the writings of the poet and artist Etel Adnan, with whom many artists on display share a very strong connection. Echoing Etel Adnan’s poetry, the exhibition evokes the seemingly elusive character of natural elements, staging the various atmospheric changes and the environmental transformations that pervade Punta della Dogana.
The memory of places is one of the leitmotivs of Luogo e Segni. The memory of past exhibitions, such as “Garden of Memory” that brought together in 2018 Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal and Robert Wilson at the musée Yves Saint Laurent marrakech. Memory of cities, Beirut, New York, Sarajevo. The memory of Venice and its many overlapping eras. The memory of Punta della Dogana, with its emblematic artworks that connect Luogo e Segni to the past exhibitions of the Pinault Collection.
Another theme is that of the special affinity that binds the artists, between them and to Etel Adnan in particular, be it of mutual esteem and inspiration or a more intimate bond, friendship or love. Roni Horn and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Simone Fattal and Etel Adnan, Liz Deschenes and Berenice Abbott, Tacita Dean and Julie Mehretu, Philippe Parreno and Etel Adnan but also works resulting from the collaboration between Anri Sala and Ari Benjamin Meyers, or Charbel-joseph H. Boutros and Stéphanie Saadé… All these ‘conversations’ map the implicit geography of a cohesive way of thinking between individualities coming from different horizons but all inhabited by poetry.
Poetry stands at the heart of the exhibition, through the verses of poems chosen by the artists to converse with their works in the catalogue.
