10 Shows to See in Venice During the Biennale, From a Surrealism Survey to an Anish Kapoor Retrospective

“Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity” at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum

This year’s main exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” is expected to evince a return by today’s artists to Surrealism, all while paying homage to some of that 20th-century movement’s lesser-known non-male purveyors. The Peggy Guggenheim Museum’s 60-work show “Surrealism and Magic” will neatly compliment the Biennale this year, furnishing its themes by zeroing in specifically on why artists like Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, and Leonora Carrington (whose writings lent the Biennale’s main exhibition its name) were so interested in the occult. There will be famed works here, including Max Ernst’s painting Attirement of the Bride (1940), which normally is on view at the museum, though there will also be deep cuts that are traveling to Italy from museums in New York, Jerusalem, Stockholm, and elsewhere.

Marlene Dumas at Palazzo Grassi

The biggest exhibitions staged during the Venice Biennale tend to be some of the flashiest offerings in the city, and that means that this survey of artist Marlene Dumas is likely to stand out because it is so understated. Dumas creates portraits of people and scenes spotted in publications and films, and occasionally even from her own observation. Depicted in muted colors, they aspire to translate intangible human emotions and make them permanent through paint. Often, she combines that interest with an eye toward the racism and misogyny of her home country of South Africa. In this show, 100 of her paintings, drawings, and installations will be on view.

Anish Kapoor at Gallerie dell’Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin

With each passing Biennale, there is always one show with big, controversial art that tends to be a must-see, not necessarily for the quality of what’s on view but for the fanfare surrounding it. These twin Anish Kapoor shows are likely to fill that slot this year because, like it or not, people will be talking about them. At the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits is organizing what is being billed as a comprehensive retrospective, spanning the sculptures composed of sharply hued pigment that initially brought Kapoor fame during the ’90s to works made from Vantablack, the darkest known shade of black, that have periodically plunged the contentious artist into scandal. (Lisson Gallery, which represents Kapoor, was one of the organizers of the Accademia show; six other galleries with ties to the artist also provided funding to it.) Meanwhile, over at the Palazzo Manfrin, which Kapoor has turned into his own exhibition space and workshop, he’s debuting new works that he made using carbon nanotechnology.

Danh Vo, Isamu Noguchi, and Park Seo-Bo at Fondazione Querini Stampalia

Danh Vo has made a career out of using others’ objects as his own, wringing all kinds of weird and strange meaning out of seemingly banal things in the process, and here, he’ll continue that approach using ready-made artworks by painter Park Seo-Bo and the late sculptor Isamu Noguchi. (White Cube, which represents all three of those artists, sponsored the exhibition.) For what he views as something akin to a sculpture unto itself, Vo and curator Chiara Bertola have strewn the building with Noguchi’s famed “Akari” lamps and Park’s abstractions. Those works, all produced during the 20th century, will mingle with some new ones produced by Vo specifically for the show, and they will share space with masterworks dating back to the Baroque era, creating an artistic dialogue that spans centuries and continents.

“Louise Nevelson: Persistence” at Procuratie Vecchie

The world has not been short on sizable Louise Nevelson exhibitions, with the most recent one, a 70-piece survey at the Fondazione Roma Museo, having been staged less than a decade ago, in 2013. But this one is imbued with a certain importance, given that 60 years ago, Nevelson represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale. Her posthumous return to the city will see 60 of her works, including her much-loved painted wood sculptures resembling mysterious grids with geometrical forms nested inside alcoves, transported to the Procuratie Vecchie, which just underwent a re-up courtesy of David Chipperfield, a favorite architect for members of the art-world elite. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, the show’s curator, has made a priority of displaying Nevelson’s monumental sculptures alongside lesser-known works, such as her collages, in which wood pieces combine in dynamic ways.

Ha Chong-Hyun at Palazzo Tito

Ha Chong-Hyun have yet to catch on with Western audiences in quite the same way as others affiliated with Dansaekhwa, a 1970s South Korean art movement that pushed the possibilities of painting by distilling abstraction to its basics. But with this show being mounted by Ha’s three galleries (Almine Rech, Kukje, and Blum & Poe), people from all over will get a taste of the artist’s elegant style by way of a small survey of more than 20 of his works. Sunjung Kim, artistic director of the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, is curating. (She faced controversy last year for alleged misconduct while leading the Gwangju Biennale Foundation in a position she has since left, though she denied the accusations.) Included in the show will be works from Ha’s beloved, if under-recognized, “Conjunction” series, begun in 1974. For these works, he applied paint to the back of hemp canvases, rather than the front, and allowed his colors to run down his surface, ceding control to his materials and leaving the final result to evince “a spirit of naturalness,” as he once said.

Stanley Whitney at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi

We’re still two years off from a major retrospective for painter Stanley Whitney at the Albright-Knox Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, but thankfully, we don’t have to wait quite that long for a survey of his abstractions composed of blocks of color arranged into askew rows. Curated by the Walker Art Center’s Vincenzo de Bellis and the Albright-Knox’s Cathleen Chaffee (who is organizing the 2024 retrospective), the show will focus specifically on the works produced by Whitney in Italy, where he and his wife relocated in 1992 after finding the New York scene inhospitable for a Black abstract painter like himself. Chaffee and de Bellis have promised that the show will specifically explore the role that age-old Italian architecture played in helping to define Whitney’s output from 1992 onward.

Diane Policarpo at Ocean Space

One of two shows on view at the recently inaugurated Ocean Space during the Biennale, this one will feature one of the largest works to date by Diane Policarpo, whose sound works and videos have drawn out previously unseen political contexts latent within the natural world. Her latest project, Cigatuera, will involve film and audio elements, and will draw on research conducted on the Portuguese-controlled Savage Islands, off the coast of Morocco. The work takes its name from a kind of poisoning caused by fish. “The installation is an island, a wild island, untouched by humans,” the show’s curator, Chus Martínez, writes in a statement accompanying the exhibition.

Afro Basaldella at Ca’ Pesaro

During the postwar era, artist Afro Basaldella scooped up various accolades, earning a special prize for Italian art at the 1956 Venice Biennale and receiving a placement in the second edition of the famed Documenta quinquennial in 1959. Despite his steady place in Italian art history, and despite his work’s inclusion in the collections of institutions like Tate and the Museum of Modern Art, Afro, as the artist was often known for short, is lesser-known beyond the country. Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Edith Devaney, this 45-work survey will provide many with their first extensive look at Afro’s output, which often took the form of abstractions featuring intersecting geometric planes. The show will focus on his artistic journey from Italy, where he was a part of an eight-person artist collective known as the Gruppo degli Otto Pittori Italiani, to the U.S., where he became friends with Willem de Kooning and absorbed Abstract Expresssionist techniques, and back again to Italy between the 1950s and 1970s.

“to where the flowers are blooming” at Spazio Berlendis

First staged in South Korea two years ago, this exhibition considers the bruising legacy of a quashed uprising in Gwangju in 1980 led by citizens protesting governmental corruption. The state-ordered bloodshed that ensued has left a permanent mark on the South Korean psyche, and was memorialized in Han Kang’s piercing 2017 novel Human Acts, a quotation from which lent the show its name. Organized by the foundation that runs the Gwangju Biennale, the show features archival materials related to the 5.18 Democratization Movement alongside works by Kader Attia, Ho Tzu Nyen, and others. Among the artists participating is Park Hwayeon, who has relied on the memories of people in Gwangju to create a reconstruction of the square where the uprising took place.

Correction, 4/21/22, 4:45 a.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the name of a curator of the Stalney Whitney show. It is Cathleen Chaffee, not Catherine Chaffee.