The French billionaire and art collector François Pinault was in Venice on Sunday 17 April, for the opening of major exhibitions at his two venues in the city—the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana—ten years after his arrival in the city.
The Palazzo Grassi is staging the largest-ever survey show of Sigmar Polke’s work in Italy, marking 30 years since he was awarded the Golden Lion Grand Prize for Painting for Athanor, his project for the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1986. The exhibition, which is somewhat tame for such a radical artist, spans his political images, his abstract works in purple and indigo, his figures from the circus of his childhood, and the optical games of his series Strahlen Sehen (2007). Polke played with alchemy, ancient pigments and optical illusions, but a painting showing two Germans fleeing across the barbed wire in Berlin with their suitcases (Flüchtende, 1992) is still acutely topical.
At the Punta della Dogana, the well-respected curator Caroline Bourgeois has selected 60 works from Pinault’s collection that have never been shown before. The theme of this show is the colour white. There is an atmosphere of resilience, which contrasts with the violence shown in previous exhibitions of the collection. This corresponds with the mood of Martin Béthenod, the director of the foundation, who believes that the institution has now found its place in Venice. “Ten years ago, there were comments about French arrogance, but it was the same with the big businesses from Turin when Agnelli took over the Palazzo Grassi, and before that with the Americans at the time of the Guggenheim Foundation. Now we are old school…,” he says.
The foundation attracts 30,000 visitors a month, amounting to 2.2 million entries over the past decade. Over the course of 19 exhibitions, it has shown 1,700 works from Pinault’s collection, representing around 40% of the total.
In the Dogana show, a 1960 work by Fabio Mauri shows a black screen with the word Fine (“the end” in Italian). This seems far from being the case for Pinault who has expressed his intention of opening a new exhibition space in the heart of Paris. Several French media reports have named the historical building of the Commodity Stock Exchange as a possible site, but, according to our sources, discussions are still on going with the city and various public partners about other potential locations.