May 16 2024

Arnulf Rainer (Baden bei Wien, 1929) and Emilio Vedova (Venice, 1919-2006), despite their differences in age and training, enjoyed a long friendship and shared a similar conception of the artist’s life as one necessarily engaged with the events of their time. The Venice show continues a dialogue initiated in 2020 in Baden bei Wien at the Arnulf Rainer Museum, where an exhibition entitled “Arnulf Rainer & Emilio Vedova: ‘Tizian schaut’” provided an opportunity to reinterpret, with these two artists, the history of relations between Venice and Vienna. The Austrian capital’s prestigious history and slow decline to ‘Decadent Vienna’ reminded Vedova of the decline and fall of Venice’s a century or so earlier. The Venetian master also maintained friendships and professional contacts in Vienna in addition to the shared cultural interests which he and his wife Annabianca pursued keenly there. But the reasons that have prompted the Vedova Foundation to enter enthusiastically into this collaborative project with the Arnulf Rainer Museum are many, and we are pleased to be able to revisit those historic connections between Vienna and Venice through the work of two great artists of our time.

In the Spazio Vedova, which used to be the painter's studio, there is a collection of works created by Vedova between 1949 and 1993 which instead of a chronological arrangement have been divided into thematic sections to help the visitor navigate the display: Contro, No, Venezia muore, Allarme, Umano, Confine, Plurimo, Per. The chosen titles were prompted by the recurrence of these words in Emilio Vedova’s writings and speeches, and nicely capture the Vedovian outlook and the strongly engaged stance of his works, which often generated keen debate.

Arnulf Rainer’s works have been accommodated at the Magazzino del Sale: from an output spanning a period of over 70 years, we have selected his crosses from the 1980s and the Kosmos series from the early 1990s. Rainer’s crosses inevitably evoke suffering, which could hardly be displayed in more harrowing fashion than against the salt-saturated walls of this extraordinary space. For Rainer “The cross is a metaphor for the human face” – and his crosses, like physiognomies, assume a rich variety of forms: These splashes of colour, applied with long brushes, recall his earlier vehement hand and finger paintings of the 1970s.

SPAZIO VEDOVA ZATTERE, DORSODURO 50 MAGAZZINO DEL SALE ZATTERE, DORSODURO 266

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