Venice Biennale : Giardini


Fabulous mix of exhibition and national Pavilions at the 58th Venice Biennale showcasing contemporary art.

We started by going to the Central Pavilion that showed work of a lot of the artists who had been on show in the main exhibition at the Arsenale. However here they didn’t each have their own section but the pieces were mixed together and it made you look at them in a different way and it meant you realised which artists you had particularly liked as they bubbled to the surface in this show. For me I loved the sketches by Michael Armitage  for his Kenya election pictures.

We then faced the 30 national pavilions with copious coffee breaks to keep us going. So highlights were the Belgium installation Mondo Cane by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, automated life sized puppets of serial killers and miserable people. It came with a good leaflet giving you the story of each figure. Poland showed an inside out plane. It was fascinating to see so familiar object in such a different way.

Russia paid homage to a Rembrandt in the Hermitage with an installation about it and Finland had a nice video installation with a child on ice and a sweet tune that got into our heads. I loved a video installation of dancers in the Brazilian pavilion which seemed to be full of joy in what they were doing.

I did get fed up of dark spaces and experiences. I’m a bit old fashioned and am quite happy to just look or listen to art, I don’t have to be part of it!

I think my favourite installation was in the Austrian Pavilion and was this matrix of glass roses on spikes by Renate Bertlmann. I guess it’s meaning was quite dark but I thought it just looked  beautiful in the space.

Closes 24 November 2019

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