Venice Biennial... Part II
8:33 p.m.05/16/22 - The visit to Arsenale, the second venue housing the exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani, begins with the winner of the Golden Lion, Simone Leigh. It is a monumental sculpture of almost five meters high, in bronze, with the synthetic figure of a woman, apparently African, with virtuously defined features. It is a powerful work, strategically mounted, and perhaps the most photographed image of this Biennial. A curious fact: it is the first time in 127 years of biennial that a black artist receives the highest award.
Brick House, by Simone Leigh
Bronze
Here again the curator repeats “the time capsules” that we have already seen in Giardini and here they contrast even more with this space of large rooms, occupied by expansive works. The capsules are compact and presented in condensed spaces. One of them corresponds to a real discovery: Aletta Jacobs (Netherlands, 1854-1929), who presents five papier-mâché models that refer to the different stages of a pregnancy. Exhibiting Jacobs, who was the first woman admitted to a Dutch university, is certainly unusual and surely a challenge that Alemani proposes to us, since only living and active artists are to be presented. But the curatorship considered that these female presences, which did not have a place in the History of Art at the time, are the predecessors of what is produced today.
Womb models by the Ateliers Auzoux, by Aletta Jacobs (1840)
The uterine forms are repeated in Marguerite Humeau (France, 1986) but in superlative dimensions. These biomorphic sculptures pivot between the representation of procreation in some future civilization and an image of what creation could have been at the beginning of time. However, the artist is an activist of natural protectionism, especially of the oceans.
Migrations, by Marguerite Humea (2022)
Installation, biological and synthetic resin and polymer, glass, steel.
Teresa Solar (Madrid, Spain 1985) also exhibits monumental sculptures that hover between the natural and the artificial. We highlight a large-scale installation with a zoomorphic structure that resembles the gills of fish.
Tunnel Boring Machine, by Teresa Solar (2022)
Materials: resin and clay
This extremely limited group is excellent for showing that, through so much fantasy, Cecilia Alemani is committed to imagining a new future with changes in the historical canon of art. Thus we end the visit of this exhibition that begins this Biennial, which is a real surprise and a balm for the senses.
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