Museo di Palazzo Grimani

When visiting Venice for the 58th Venice Biennale I had no idea what to expect (seeing it was my first time) and was completely blown away when I discovered that the palaces from the old Venice families (the ones I imagined likes of the Medici’s living in, in art history class) now serve as museums/galleries. 

The juxtaposition of old and new world is absolutely divine, and this Palazzo is “the only Renaissance Roman mannerist-inspired house in Venice.” (source). The property was owned by Antonio Grimani, who became a doge in 1521, and it became a museum in 2008.  

About the Exhibition - Pittura/Panorama

During the Biennale the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Venetian Heritage, and Gagosian teamed up to bring this exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler works to this incredible space. 

“Curated by John Elderfield, Pittura/Panorama features fourteen paintings covering a forty-year span of Helen Frankenthaler’s career.” (source) 

“The exhibition focuses on the artist’s development of the pittura (painting) and the panorama: the interplay between works like easel paintings, although made on the floor, and large, horizontal paintings that open onto shallow but expansive spaces, in the way that panoramas do.”  (source) 

“Helen’s paintings of the early 1990s bring to a climax her creation of big, wide, painterly canvases, more dramatic and atmospheric than any she had done before. As such, they look back to the roots of painterly painting in Venice in the 16th century, while being utterly her own, modernist compositions.” - John Elderfield (source) 

Concurrently, Gagosian hosted an exhibition of paintings by Helen Frankenthaler in Rome, during this time. 

Below is a video where John Elderfield (curator) and Elizabeth Smith (executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation)  where they discuss the works of Helen Frankenthaler