Awaiting Venice Biennale 2026: Elisabetta Barisoni

Elisabetta Barisoni: I joined the Musei Civici as Curator of the Modern Area, and in 2016 I became Head of Ca’ Pesaro. Venice has changed enormously, and I notice this first and foremost as a citizen, even before my role as Head of the Museum Division Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (MUVE). The city has changed dramatically, especially after Covid, but in a positive sense. Over the past five years Venice has opened up significantly, starting already in the period following the last acqua granda – the extreme tidal flooding event of 2019 – which hit Ca’ Pesaro particularly hard, as well as the Museo Fortuny.
After Covid, Venice experienced a real rebirth, with an extraordinary surge of interest in contemporary art. Countless gallery owners have moved here, opening new galleries and strengthening the Venetian gallery network, an essential ecosystem also for public institutions such as the Fondazione Musei Civici and other museums. Independent spaces have multiplied too, along with artist-run initiatives and major foundations, alongside the arrival of substantial investments linked to contemporary art.
So, for me, the change has been positive, especially for modern and contemporary contexts. It’s not that Venice was a “dead” city in 2016 – far from it – but today the network is much broader and more extensive. Even the Musei Civici, from my perspective, have undergone a profound transformation.

EB: Exactly, and the change is not only numerical. Last year we acquired the Museo di Torcello, returning to the origins of Venetian culture and civilisation: a treasure chest that, in my view, should be a must-see for all tourists and visitors who want to understand what the dream of Venice once was.
The thirteenth museum, which will open in April, will instead be on the mainland and will tell a more recent story: it will be a museum of the contemporary. MUVEC, the Casa delle Contemporaneità, will present the civic collections – starting with those held at Ca’ Pesaro, the Municipality’s collections of contemporary artists, understood as post-1948, that is, after the Second World War. So we have expanded not only the number of museums, but also our ability to narrate the history of this territory.
I also believe that the Foundation has changed thanks to our ongoing work with the municipal administration and our President. We have committed ourselves to areas not necessarily or directly linked to museums, such as educational programmes and advanced training. I am thinking, for example, of the Abate Zanetti Glass School, or the Artist Residencies, a new venture launched last year in collaboration with the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation. In Mestre we opened a space that is not a museum, the Emeroteca dell’Arte, where we host 13 artists in residence.
Beyond the museums, in December we opened the first of the restored Napoleonic barracks at Forte Marghera. These are exhibition spaces set within a magnificent historic waterside park on the threshold between Mestre and Venice, where La Biennale di Venezia and the Accademia di Belle Arti have long been active. They are kunsthalle-type venues, without permanent collections but open to contemporary art. In the future we will also open a social venue in the former Centrale del Latte at the Palaplip in Carpenedo, Mestre. Over these ten years, thanks also to continuity in the presidency, we have been able to pursue actions that have made us a “diffuse museum” and a fully fledged cultural institution, attentive to inclusion, gender equality and education, not only to the conservation of heritage.

EB: It was obviously a very strong change, because Gabriella Belli’s directorship had provided an impetus that led to extremely positive results.
The Foundation then appointed a new, outstanding scientific committee, made up of experts who offered new guidelines and external perspectives to steer the institution’s work outward and towards the international sphere.
As for me, for a year now I have been Director of the Modern Area and, in addition to Ca’ Pesaro, I have also taken on the Museo Fortuny, this jewel that has long been the subject of restoration and a revision of its exhibition route. I am also the director responsible for the entire MUVE presence in Mestre, that is, the whole set of activities and spaces including the new museum, the Emeroteca dell’Arte, the Napoleonic barracks, the Palaplip and the Vega storage facility. It has therefore been a huge commitment, also on a personal level, especially in shaping the identity and vision of these new places. Let’s say we haven’t been idle: everyone worked extremely hard, and skills and professional expertise that were already developing have now fully matured. I can say that management has changed its skin, as have the governance model and the organisational structure.

EB: Undoubtedly, my level of autonomy in the modern area has increased. Previously my autonomy was mainly linked to curatorial and exhibition choices at Ca’ Pesaro, whereas today it extends to all the museums I oversee. Just as the city has changed, so have I. Venice, a mythical city, is never the same as itself, because it cyclically constructs and deconstructs itself, roughly every five years. In this sense I have tried to fine-tune my approach, following a coherent exhibition line while also understanding which initiatives, and for how long, can work best in a city under such intense scrutiny – especially during Biennale Arte years, when an enormous number of projects converge. It is therefore important to realise that some proposals need to remain on view for longer, so that visitors have time to notice them and plan their visit accordingly.

EB: The three contemporary choices for Biennale Arte 2026 represent, for the Foundation, a focus on two major museums of modern and contemporary art – Ca’ Pesaro and the Museo Fortuny – with different declinations and inclinations, and also with differentiated openings. We open on 28 March with the first major exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro: the monographic retrospective of Jenny Saville. I have been working with and in contact with Jenny since at least 2019, before Covid, when she had a city-wide exhibition in Florence; in parallel we were preparing a major exhibition with the National Portrait Gallery in London, which eventually took place last summer. Initially we had thought of starting together, but then came acqua alta, Covid, and various postponements.
I must say I love her deeply: she is an artist who needs no introduction. She emerged very young in the art world, already in the 1990s, when, having graduated in Glasgow, her work “Propped”, which will be in the exhibition, made her one of Saatchi’s favourite artists, giving her complete freedom. She is one of the artists who, for me, helped shape the visual imagination on which I was trained. She took part in “Sensation”, she is tangential to the Young British Artists but does not truly belong to that group; she does, however, have a remarkable painterly coherence that I have always admired. I pursued her for years, and I believe she is the right choice for Ca’ Pesaro, because Jenny Saville is not an artist of the new wave: she is now a historical figure.
The final room of the exhibition, which is very dear to me, will be dedicated to Jenny Saville’s relationship with Venice. She has been coming to Venice since she was young: she came with her uncle to attend summer painting schools, painted en plein air, knows Venetian art deeply and bought pigments and temperas here. What is extraordinary is that she has been up on the scaffolding three times during the restoration of Titian’s “Assumption”, and she has a perfect visual memory of Titian’s brushwork: a painter’s memory. This final room will therefore be a homage to her relationship with Titian, Giorgione, and the Venetian school.
In May, when Biennale Arte opens, we will inaugurate two small rooms dedicated to a unique and extraordinary project by Hernan Bas.
Bas is developing a cycle that will in part be completed right here in Venice: a pictorial series entitled “I Visitatori” (“The Visitors”), dedicated to tourists, to the faces and identities he encounters. Both second-floor rooms, the so-called Dom Pérignon rooms, will therefore be occupied by this series of faces – larger and smaller – brought together in a single message that is very playful yet also intense, as Hernan knows how to be: very modern, very contemporary. Painting again, then, but obviously painting that is completely different, in its starting point and outcome, from that of Jenny Saville.
Not painting, but sculpture, will be the focus of the major exhibition opening during Biennale week, dedicated to Erwin Wurm at the Museo Fortuny. The explosive creativity of this great artist – the greatest living Austrian sculptor – will blend with the magic of the Museo Fortuny. His sculptures, made of presence and absence, of high and low, his work on clothing and on the construction of the human figure, will also dialogue with reflections intrinsic to Mariano Fortuny. It will be fascinating to see Erwin Wurm’s ironic, highly post-pop playfulness engage with Fortuny’s magical universe, extending even into photography.
The main exhibition will start on the ground floor, but some sculptures will be scattered along the route up to the second floor, where the “One Minute Sculptures” will appear – the celebrated works that made him famous in the 1990s, in which the visitor is called upon to act directly, becoming a sculpture of themselves. On the second floor there will also be a dialogue between Wurm’s photographs and Mariano Fortuny’s self-portraits: a kind of performative art through photography, in a confrontation that I imagine will be both entertaining and stimulating, and also a way of rediscovering this museum.
The Museo Fortuny, after all, has always had a strong experimental tendency in its exhibition history. Last year we celebrated fifty years since its establishment as a museum, in 1975, and over the years it has often presented artists for the first time. This exhibition marks Erwin Wurm’s first monographic presentation in an Italian museum, a context that resonates perfectly with the experimental nature of the Museo Fortuny.

EB: Collaboration with the major players of the gallery world, as one might say, but also with large companies, is very important. I am thinking, for example, of Dom Pérignon. I arrived at Ca’ Pesaro when the planning of a very fine exhibition, “Chanel: The Woman Who Reads”, organised with Chanel, was already under way. In that case, for instance, Chanel enabled, through the Art Bonus, the restoration of a monumental pictorial cycle by Giulio Aristide Sartorio, which we then exhibited last year at Ca’ Pesaro, together with the restoration of the Meduna staircase. These were not only very important co-productions, but also genuine acts of patronage.
I also think of the ongoing patronage we have with Louis Vuitton, and thus with private companies. As for galleries, I must say they provide enormous support, both in terms of co-design and production. One example is the Gorky Archive managed by Hauser & Wirth, with which we organised the Arshile Gorky exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro. Another example is precisely the collaboration with Gagosian for the Jenny Saville exhibition, as well as the facilitation of truly significant loans, also in terms of scale, for instance from Los Angeles, where the masterpieces of Jenny held at The Broad are coming from.
I could mention many other organisations, such as Galleria Continua, Victoria Miro, and many more. Galleries do help institutions: the public-private relationship, if it is very clear and explicit and managed with expertise, is extremely virtuous. Over the years we have also received immediate donations. I recall, for example, during the acqua alta, a patron who, through our President, immediately financed the restoration of “Grande Cardinale” by Giacomo Manzù, which had ended up underwater and was the only work damaged during the flood.
This public-private relationship is very virtuous, but it remains essential that the vision, identity and decisions about how and what to exhibit remain in the hands of the institution.
We are the Fondazione dei Musei Civici Veneziani, and we have a responsibility towards the city: we manage and conserve, on behalf of the Municipality, a public heritage that belongs first and foremost to citizens, but also to the Italian territory. Our responsibility is to know where we want to go, which limits to set for ourselves, and then to build a virtuous and absolutely transparent relationship with the private sector.

EB: At the moment we are working on several projects to propose to the Board of Directors for the 2028 Biennale. Major artists obviously need to be scheduled well in advance, and we are fully aware of the pressure Venice experiences during Biennale Arte years.
As for Ca’ Pesaro in 2027, the year of the Architecture Biennale, I can anticipate that we are working on the figure of Virgilio Guidi, with the association recently established in his name. This exhibition follows the line of Gastone Novelli, Roberto Matta and Afro, also a rediscovery of these great masters in their full complexity. We are also working at the Fortuny for 2027, the Architecture Biennale year. For the coming year we are developing a project on Isadora Duncan and the idea of launching a series: if it proves successful, and if it is a shared intention of the Board or the next Board of Directors, it will be important to work on figures who interacted with her, icons, I would say, of the recent period. So Duncan, but also Ruth Saint-Denis, and many others; for example D’Annunzio, Proust, who interact at various levels with Fortuny, Mariano and Henriette. In my vision for the Fortuny, these exhibitions are perfect for Architecture Biennale years, while in Art Biennale years it will be important, where possible, to place Mariano and Henriette in dialogue with the great protagonists of the contemporary.