During the opening week of the 59th Biennale Arte of Venice, on the 20th of April the Californian artist Mary Weatherford inaugurated “The flaying of Marsyas” at the beautiful Grimani Palace, a Renaissance place in the heart of Venice where the doge Antonio Grimani and his family lived from the 16th century.

Photos from nytimes.com

The second floor, opened for the first time just for this exhibition, is totally for the big canvas with the neon of Weatherford. This series, created during the lockdown of 2021, has been inspired by the look of the work of  Titian “The flaying of Marsyas” in Rome some year ago.
The artist put on these canvases the colors and the light of this painting, playing with the palette also with the use of the neon. What Titian wanted to represent in his painting – the violence of the flaying, the grief of Marsyas who lost a musical competition against Apollo, the god of Music – can be seen also on the canvas of Weatherford, where her experiment with the light of the neon is able to analyze and reflect the violence and the atmosphere of the mythological theme.

Titian - “The flaying of Marsyas”

The exhibition, produced by Gagosian, has been organized with the help of the Regional Direction of Veneto and of the Venetian Heritage Foundation. It completes the will of Palazzo Grimani to combine the contemporaneity with the Palace, started also with the series Archinto by Georg Baselitz, always produced by Gagosian. 

 On Saturday 19th, at Michela Rizzo Gallery - located in the characteristic Giudecca Island, on the lagoon of Venice – the solo show of the Austrian artist Michael Höepfner opened for the first time in this location. Large-scale drawings and black and white photos of his trips come together with the installations of his walking through nature.

© Galleria Michela Rizzo 2022

Höepfner focused his artistic research on the personal discovery of unexplored territory and nature, generating art from his experience gained in his solo trips of the last years. He travels and discovers nature with just a tent and a backpack, where he puts his camera and a notebook to show what he sees and what he feels in different ways. He walked especially in Tibet, and in the last years, he travelled also in Europe: the fil rouge of all these trips has always been the “happening”, the single event that is always different from one trip to another and it helps him to detach from the world, the reality.

“Each step I have taken along a trail on a muddy bank of a free-flowing river in Albania or on a paved road along the dry Western beaches of the Paratethys leads me into a dimension of time and place that is not human but can be just looked at and be interpreted by humans”, states the artist.