Sean Kelly Artists in Venice

Count on Us, 2003, is a multi-channel installation comprised of four video channels: 'Star', 'Boy', 'Girl', and 'Chorus.' Originally created as an emotional response to the Balkan War, Abramović's message applies to the current war in the Ukraine, as well as future wars happening anytime or anywhere.

The film ‘Chorus’ shows a children’s choir, dressed solemnly in black, singing the hymn of the United Nations in Serbo-Croatian, which is conducted by a skeleton, mounted on the back of the artist in a black costume.  When Abramović returned to Belgrade after the war, she found a music school with a professor who composed himself the song about the United Nations, glorifying their help. However, for Abramović, the song is a metaphor for something that really didn't happen. According to the artist, “the food sent to help was from old storages, with expired medications and expired canned foods. It created more damage than help. The chorus conducted by the skeleton is an ironic response.”

"With this piece I hoped to say
Yes, we had a war
Yes, we are in economic disaster
Yes, the country is in ruins
Still there are children
They are our energy and they are our hope"

Marina Abramović was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Since the beginning of her career in the early 1970s when she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.

This will be Abramović's third time exhibiting work in the Venice Biennale (previously in 1976 and 1997). She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her extraordinary video installation and performance piece Balkan Baroque.

For inquiries please email Lauren Kelly

And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire 

Suggesting multiple ways in which his 2019 film can be interpreted, Charrière notes that beneath the political debates, philosophical reflections and symbolic meanings associated with various phenomena of the environmental system, there lies the original and autonomous state of the planet, free from all human interpretation. Deep beneath the Earth's surface, between its outer-most crust and inner core, magma—the molten or semi-molten natural material from which all igneous rocks are formed—constantly churns. Even in the most frozen regions of the earth, this "liquid fire" constantly flows.

In this film, Charrière’s fountain depicts an absurd state that implies the coexistence of opposite elements, water and fire. The artist turns the traditional iconography of the fountain on its head in symbolic terms too: the connection with water and the concept of a spring of life now dominated by flames. Fire has an ambiguous meaning, for it is not just an element of destruction but is also considered humankind’s oldest conquest, corresponding to the beginning of civilization.

Wildfire (Meditation on Fire)

Biological programming, still existent in today’s living creatures dictates a reflex to stay away from fire if it cannot be contained (i.e. a wildfire). A ‘meditation on fire’ may therefore sound like an impossibility. These works are all about the wonder of images. How can so little do so much? 

Inspired by the inquiry into the amount of power needed to produce a digital “still life” of fire, this work confronts the biological and the digital. Long shots of silenced fire appropriate the notion of a biological breathing time, while the abstract nature of the burning fire becomes a reference to technological abstraction, suggesting the increasingly abstract world in which we live.

In Wildfire (Meditation of Fire), the camera has been removed and disintegrated into a numerical system of binary codes. We are confronted with the illusion of an image, a hallucination, a visual construct of computing. These images create an immersive experience of the impossible.

"I want people to be able to touch this image and this light with their eyes in complete tranquillity. I want them to take in this scene with serenity, but also to appreciate these trees transformed into torches as permanent things, even though in graphic terms, everything seems to inform us that nothing will ever be the same again." - David Claerbout

For inquiries, please email Janine Cirincione

Two masters of sculpture, Lucio Fontana and Antony Gormley, are brought together for the first time through a presentation of graphic works, works on paper and sculpture. The exhibition will take shape inside an extraordinary space: the Negozio Olivetti, property of Generali Assicurazioni and entrusted to the care and management of FAI, an architectural jewel completed in 1958 and nestled in the porticoes of Piazza San Marco in Venice and designed by Carlo Scarpa.

The exhibition has been conceived and curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, one of the world’s leading scholars of Lucio Fontana, as well as a scientific consultant to the Foundation dedicated to the artist.  The exhibition is built around a concise association of space and light to be found in the work of both sculptors. It will develop across a selection of drawings made by Fontana between 1946 and 1968 and a series of drawings, workbooks and models that run through all aspects of Antony Gormley's research, together with the presence of sculptures by both of the artists.

The new portraits depict young Black men and women in positions of vulnerability and tells a story of survival and resilience, revealing the beauty that can emerge from the horrific. These poses, borrowed from Western European art historical sources, function as beautiful elegies echoing a central metaphor of youth and resilience and stand as monuments to endurance and perseverance in the face of savagery, incorporating a scale that pushes beyond the mere corporeal and into the realm of spiritual icons, of martyrs and saints.

The exhibition is curated by Christophe Leribault, President of the Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie, who organized Kehinde Wiley: Lamentation, Wiley’s first exhibition in France at the Petit Palais in 2016. As an art historian specializing in 19th century, Leribault has a deep connection to the art historical underpinnings of Wiley’s work.

For inquiries, please email Janine Cirincione