Three other off exhibitions of the Venice Biennale 2022

Claire Tabouret in double and in dialogue with the past, at Palazzo Cavanis

In this palace built on the waterfront between the 15th and 16th centuries, the majestic paintings and fountain sculptures of the French artist supported by the Almine Rech gallery take on their full dimension. “Claire Tabouret: I’m spacious, singing flesh” is an exhibition where we reread the recurring themes of the artist, in the light of archaeologicalex-voto tuff representing Matres Matutae of Capua, these Latin goddesses of the Morning and the Dawn (V-II s BC). “I chose these ex-votos for their significance and ritual dimension,” she explains. They are a vehicle for exploring a dual and multiple condition of the self in relation to fertility and motherhood, which intertwines individual identity and larger forces.”

Thus, her powerful double self-portrait painted in 2020 echoes a majestic double ancient Madonna, with disturbing similarities. Ritual, motherhood, mother earth, ambivalent identity, doubling, transfiguration are the subjects that run through the eight rooms. In several of them, The Team, a colorful portrait of female figures linked by their textile garments, converses with the architecture of the place, or Snow in the desert (2017), the monumental canvas with chromatic effects plays with those of a splendid Murano chandelier. Organized by Kathryn Weir, director of MADRE in Naples, the exhibition ends in the gardens, where Claire Tabouret’s mute ceramic fountain-girls give the place a dimension that is both gentle and ambiguous.

“Claire Tabouret : I’m spacious, singing flesh”, Palazzo Cavanis, Dorsoduro 920, 30123 Venise. Jusqu’au 27 novembre 2022.

Antoni Clavé, the warrior of Palazzo Franchetti

In the sumptuous rooms of the palace, fifty pieces by the Catalan painter Antoni Clavé (1913-2005) interact with sculptures and African masks, which this historic figure of post-war art, a friend of Picasso, liked to surround himself with. Often of imposing dimensions, the sculptures, canvases, “cupboards” and tapestries reveal his attraction to African culture, but also to salvaged and discarded materials and simple, almost raw forms. Conceived by Aude Hendgen, director of the Clavé Archives, and the independent curator Sitor Senghor, the exhibition of these works, produced between 1958 and the 1990s, highlights the figure of the warrior, a major part of his body of work. Similarly, he emphasizes the diversity of his techniques, often artisanal, such as collage, crumpled paper, embossed or trompe l’oeil, tapestry, which this great colorist was a fierce fan.

Finally, the exhibition accentuates his interest in bright, almost streaming colors, hemming in an increasingly evanescent figure of the combatant. In one of the largest rooms, the monumental canvas “Toile froissée aux guerriers” with its splendid draperies from 1981 converses smoothly with five masks, created in 1965, from modest materials. And reveals his serious appetite for the sacred. Staged in a subdued light giving the whole a solemn atmosphere, the pieces of the one who represented Spain at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984, reach a new plenitude, inside the Gothic palace.

“Antoni Clavé, the Spirit of the Warrior”, Palazzo Franchetti, San Marco 2842, Venice. Until October 23, 2022.

Surrealism and Magic, the landmark exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Six rooms, more than twenty artists, more than ninety works from numerous public and private collections constitute a dense journey highlighting the attraction of the Surrealists for esotericism, alchemy, magic and the occult. In collaboration with the Barberini Museum of Potsdam, the event offers both focus on major artists such as Giorgio De Chirico, Victor Brauner, Kurt Seligmann, as well as thematic rooms on cosmology, the invisible, androgyny, bringing together several. But above all, it is the highlighting of the surrealist women-artists which marks the spirits. A presentation at the height of their talent, in which their works, known or less known, reveal the very feminine faculty to metamorphose, to transfigure.

The Great Lady (1951), a sculpture representing a hybrid being by Leonora Carrington, or the splendid Portrait of Princess Francesca Ruspoli (1944) by Leonor Fini, others by Dorothea Tanning, the Spanish artist Remedios Varo, attest to these ambivalent creatures, between mother-goddess, witch, ogress, chimera and fairy. A historical exhibition testifying on all these invisible of the surrealist clan, acting as an appetizer to the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, whose Milk of Dreams, title of the theme, is borrowed from the eponymous book by Leonora Carrington.

“Surrealism and Magic: An Enchanted Modernity, ” Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Dorsoduro 701, Venice. Until September 26, 2022.

Virginie Chuimer-Layen