9 November 2026
The Biennale Arte closes on 22 November, and so do Jenny Saville at Ca' Pesaro, Lorna Simpson at Punta della Dogana and Erwin Wurm at Museo Fortuny. On the 14th the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opens a show on the Fucina degli Angeli, the workshop that turned artists' designs into glass from 1955: Murano, without the vaporetto out to Murano.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)Closes 22 November
Koyo Kouoh's 61st International Art Exhibition, completed by her team after her death in 2025: 110 artists across the Giardini, the Arsenale and the city.
Peggy Guggenheim CollectionOpens 14 November
Postwar Murano glass from Egidio Costantini's Fucina degli Angeli, founded in 1955 to turn artists' designs into glass, with Peggy Guggenheim among its backers. Not the Murano glass in the shops by the Rialto.
Ca' Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern ArtCloses 22 November
Jenny Saville's first major Venice show: more than 30 paintings and drawings from the 1990s on, ending with new works made in homage to the city.
Punta della DoganaCloses 22 November
Lorna Simpson's largest European show in over a decade: about fifty paintings, collages, sculptures, installations and films on memory, representation and identity.
Palazzo Fortuny (Museo Fortuny)Closes 22 November
The first major Italian retrospective of the Austrian sculptor: One Minute Sculptures, anthropomorphic objects and the body treated as sculpture. A One Minute Sculpture takes about as long as your holiday-photo pose on the Rialto.
Palazzo Mocenigo – Museum of Textiles and CostumeCloses 11 November
Silk panels by Lucio Andrich, pieced from Missoni and Como fabric offcuts and hand-stitched by Burano embroiderer Maria Tagliapietra, with subjects from Dolomite legends to lagoon fauna. Italy's most upmarket scrap bag.
Palazzo GrassiUntil 10 January
Armitage paints on lubugo, a Ugandan funeral bark cloth whose holes and ridges show through the paint: 45 paintings on Kenyan politics, migration and myth. Slow Venice wrote that he "casts an attractive lure, then hurls you into tragedy."
Palazzo Mocenigo – Museum of Textiles and Costume
Silk panels by Lucio Andrich (1927-2003), pieced from Missoni and Como fabric offcuts and hand-stitched by Burano embroiderer Maria Tagliapietra: Dolomite legends to lagoon fauna.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Curated by Giovanna Zabotti, a lagoon-inspired show with Dardust, Paolo Fantin, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Alberto Scodro, opening on a reflecting pool of underwater "notes".
Palazzo Fortuny (Museo Fortuny)
First major Italian retrospective of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm: One Minute Sculptures, anthropomorphic objects and the body as sculpture, blending humour and philosophy.
Museo Storico Navale
A century through the lens of the Life photojournalist behind V-J Day in Times Square, from 1930s Europe to portraits of Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. Curated by Monica Poggi.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Lubaina Himid's large multi-panel paintings of architects, boatbuilders and tailors debating whether to move or stay probe belonging and making a home somewhere new.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Yto Barrada draws on the long history of textile work in a sequence of environments: suspended shapes, a Saturn room of folded wool, and stalling machines.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
Shanghai abstractionist Ding Yi shows new black-and-white paintings and stone steles from his Appearance of Crosses series, curated by Cramerotti and Scalera.
Museo Storico Navale
Paintings and sculptures by Venetian-born, Greek-adopted artist Andrea Valleri retrace ancient Mediterranean trade routes, fusing classical antiquity with Pop Art.
Ca' Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern ArtFree
Peruvian artist Nicolás Lamas assembles found objects and fragments into sculptures and installations probing how systems of classification shape what we see.
Museo di Palazzo Grimani
Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo's first solo show in Italy: new finger-painted portraits in dialogue with Venetian portraiture, on the palazzo's second floor.
Museo Correr
Bizhan Bassiri's recent and emblematic works in the Sala delle Quattro Porte, with ninety images of artists from the 15th to 21st centuries in a suspended, stepped display.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Chiara Camoni fills the Tese delle Vergini at the Arsenale with 24 life-sized sculptures woven from plants, flowers, plastics and debris, curated by Cecilia Canziani.
Fondazione Querini Stampalia
British painter Nigel Cooke's first solo show in Italy, staged during the 2026 Biennale in the library's portego, transformed into an artist's studio.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu use vanished East German sites as blueprints; Tieu wraps the facade in a trompe-l'oeil mosaic of a ruined Berlin housing block.
Museo Correr
Julian Charrière's works in dialogue with Canova's marbles in the Canova Galleries, on stone, geological memory and deep time.
Ca' Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
First major Venice show of British painter Jenny Saville: 30+ paintings and drawings from the 1990s to today, ending with new works made in homage to the city.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Alma Allen's biomorphic sculptures in walnut burl, volcanic rock, Yule marble and bronze explore elevation and transformation of matter, in the Giardini's US Pavilion.
Punta della Dogana
Lorna Simpson's largest European show in over a decade: about fifty paintings, collages, sculptures, installations and films on memory, representation and identity.
Gallerie dell'Accademia
Leiko Ikemura's glass sculptures placed among the permanent collection, in dialogue with masters from Paolo Veneziano to Giambattista Tiepolo.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
For the pavilion's 70th anniversary, Ei Arakawa-Nash merges art and parenting: visitors carry one of 200 baby dolls through the gardens and Yoshizaka's building.
La Biennale di Venezia (Giardini & Arsenale)
Koyo Kouoh's Biennale Arte 2026, completed by her team after her 2025 death: 110 artists across the Giardini, Arsenale and Venice, tuned to earth, life and quiet signals.
Punta della Dogana
Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth fills the former customs house with twenty years of work tracing colonial fractures, threaded by a line of salt outlining a ghost slave ship.
Fondazione Prada Venezia (Ca' Corner della Regina)
Nancy Spector curates 50+ works by Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, two image scavengers who mine American pop culture. Includes explicit content.
Palazzo Mocenigo – Museum of Textiles and Costume
43 works from the 12th national lacemaking competition, in needle and bobbin lace on the theme of flowers and nature, from traditional patterns to contemporary takes.
Palazzo Grassi
45 paintings and over 100 studies by the Kenyan-British painter, whose works on Ugandan bark cloth weave East African politics, violence, migration and dreamlike visions.
Museo del Vetro (Murano Glass Museum)
Finalist works from the international Venetian glass bead competition, shown in the museum's Venetian Bead Room; visitors can vote for their favourite bead.
Palazzo Grassi
Two multimedia installations by Indian artist Amar Kanwar, The Torn First Pages and The Peacock's Graveyard: poetic, political meditations on justice, mortality and impermanence.
Ca' Rezzonico – Museo del Settecento Veneziano
29 drawings from a recent donation, from Palma il Giovane's 16th century to Carlevarijs, Ricci, Canaletto and Tiepolo, shown in the first-floor portego.
Museo del Vetro (Murano Glass Museum)
About twenty new works by Murano artist Marco Toso Borella, scratched into gold leaf on glass, on incommunicability in an age of social media and AI.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
