New dates announced for major Anish Kapoor exhibition at Gallerie dell'Accademia

26 February 2021

The Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia has announced new dates for its major solo exhibition by Anish Kapoor, which will now open on 20 April and run throughout the Venice International Art Biennale to 9 October 2022. Following extensive exhibitions dedicated to Philip Guston in 2017 and to Georg Baselitz in 2019, Kapoor will be the first British artist to hold an exhibition at the historic museum. When it was founded around two centuries ago, animated by the extraordinary cultural dynamism of Leopoldo Cicognara and Antonio Canova, the Gallerie aimed to enhance the artistic production of the time alongside the ancient masterpieces in its collection. This recent objective, staging solo exhibitions by major international contemporary artists, aims to offer the public a closer dialogue to the origins of the museum and a broader experience of its historic collection, bringing its permanent and temporary exhibitions into direct conversation with one another.

Curated by art historian and Director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Taco Dibbits, the exhibition will be a comprehensive retrospective presenting key moments in Kapoor’s career and exploring the development of his unique visual language. For the first time, ground-breaking new works, created using carbon nanotechnology, will be shown. These new works further develop the language of Kapoor’s seminal sculptures, which explore the condition of what he has termed the ‘non-object’ - works that investigate the liminal space occupied by an object, between physical presence and immateriality, something that is present but absent, empty yet full.

Giulio Manieri Elia, the Accademia’s Director, says: “In the past, a 'pittore pittore', what you might call a painters’ painter, has always been chosen, in the light of their affinity with the museum's collection. Our choice of sculptor might seem a surprise, but Kapoor, because of his original and deep research into colour, light, perspective and space, grows from the roots of venetian Renaissance painting, investigating its essence and interacting intimately on an ideal - we could even say conceptual - level with Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto”.

Anish Kapoor said: “The light and space of Venice, and the glories of the Accademia’s collection, have long been an inspiration to me. I have come to love this city and its painters, sculptors and architects, and I feel honoured to be invited to engage in a visual dialogue with them. I hope I will be able to add something to the vocabulary of colour and form that has been Venice’s gift to the world.”

Find further information via the Gallerie dell'Accademia website.

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