Exhibitions, installations, and site-specific projects define Venice’s cultural offerings: between January and February 2026, independent galleries, museums, and foundations create a panorama spanning contemporary art, glass, sculpture, photography, research, and artificial intelligence
From Castello to Dorsoduro, from Murano to San Giorgio Maggiore, winter in Venice moves through solo exhibitions, group shows, and dialogues between eras and languages. Here is the guide to art exhibitions to see between January and February 2026, with dates, venues, and essential interpretive keys. A journey that complements other seasonal events: from the complete guide to events in January and February 2026 in Venice to content dedicated to Carnival 2026.
OPENINGS
- CHASING THE UNEXPECTED
VeniceArtFactory – SPARC*, San Marco 2828A, Campo Santo Stefano
Opening Friday, January 16, 6 PM
Through March 3, 2026
What happens when matter escapes control? Approximately fifteen recent works by Stefano Cescon, Damiano Colombi, and Alberto Scodro compose this group exhibition on the relationship between control and matter.
On display are Colombi’s large canvases combining acrylic and wax in abstract fields; Cescon works on three-dimensional stratifications in paraffin and pigments; Scodro exhibits sculptures in silica, metal, and resin that evoke tensions between natural and artificial.
- 10 & ZERO UNO
Castello 1830, via Garibaldi
Jacopo Zambello. Sinking Everywhere
January 22 to March 7, 2026
Opening Thursday, January 22, 6-8 PM
Bodies sinking, comfort becomes obstacle: Jacopo Zambello brings his first solo exhibition to the gallery 10 & zero uno, a former butcher shop on Via Garibaldi.
The gallery becomes part of the work: the installation constructs a room that holds and envelops, between bedroom and walk-in closet. It is a space designed to make the gaze sink.
Zambello works on the boundary between perception and reality. He cites psychology, Borges, Kawabata. Everything passes through the body: filter, measure, and starting point.
EXHIBITIONS OPEN THROUGH JANUARY
- VERO CASANOVA
Glass Museum, Fondamenta Marco Giustinian 8, Murano
Through January 18
Curated by architect Matteo Silverio of Rehub, the exhibition moves between desire and illusion, escape and transformation: eleven works tell the many lives of the legendary Venetian Giacomo Casanova.
Writer, traveler, alchemist, lover of risk and words: each exhibited work interprets a side of the character, using glass as narrative material. Some works employ recycled glass, transformed by CoReVe into new material: the artisanal gesture becomes an idea of circular economy and also a story of sustainability.
The exhibition is part of The Venice Glass Week, an international festival dedicated to glass art, and promoted by Consorzio Promovetro in collaboration with Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.
- Cosìfuntutte
Academy of Fine Arts, Magazzino del Sale 3, Dorsoduro 264
Through January 30
A digital and immersive installation inspired by Mozart’s Così fan tutte, developed through scenography, new technologies, and artificial intelligence.
A collective project, born from the work of faculty, students, doctoral candidates, and performers of the Academy of Fine Arts, within the European program Music Theatre & New Technologies – MTNT, coordinated by the Conservatory of Castelfranco and with international partners including the Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität of Klagenfurt.
- TELEMACHUS – The Quest for Self at FONDATION VALMONT
Palazzo Bonvicini, Calle de Ca’ Bonvicini, Santa Croce 2161/A
Tue-Sun 10 AM-1 PM and 2-6 PM, closed Monday
Through January 31
Free admission
Second chapter of the trilogy inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, the exhibition explores the father-son relationship through site-specific installations by four artists bound by the same connection: Jakub Flejšar and his father Pavel Roučka, Maxence Guillon and his father Didier Guillon. Monumental sculptures, paintings, and installations occupy the rooms of the Renaissance palace for an intergenerational dialogue.
A fifth room anticipates the final chapter dedicated to Penelope (April 2026).
- Mao Xuhui. Emergence of the Patriarch
Palazzo Grimani Museum, Castello, Rugagiuffa 4858
Through February 1, 2026
Curated by Lü Peng, Li Guohua, and Carlotta Scarpa, this is the first major Italian solo exhibition of Mao Xuhui, one of the protagonists of the post-Mao Chinese art scene. On display, fifty years of work: from the Patriarch and Will/Scissors cycles to the scissors, an iconic object that runs through his research as a sign of authority, control, and memory.
CLOSING IN FEBRUARY
- TABLE MANNERS
Barbati Gallery, Campo Santo Stefano 2949
Through February 14
A group exhibition with 50 artists from 18 countries celebrating the five-year anniversary of The Artist Roundtable, the platform founded in 2020 by Pia Sophie Ottes to support dialogue, listening, and collaboration among artists.
Each space in the gallery reflects an aspect of shared artistic practice: from the solitude of the studio to the collective energy of dialogue. Also on display is a special publication collecting notes, reflections, and transcripts from 34 meetings between 2021 and 2025.
- LUC TUYMANS
Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
Through February 22
Free admission
Two canvases by Luc Tuymans occupy the presbytery of the Palladian Basilica in place of Tintoretto’s large canvases, currently under restoration with Save Venice. Heat and Musicians, the largest works ever created by the Belgian artist, are displayed in the sacred space creating disorienting perspectives and atmospheres suspended between dream and reality.
On the lectern of the badalone, at the center of the main choir, a contemporary illuminated manuscript signed by the artist becomes part of the collection that since 2019 has welcomed Sean Scully, Ai Weiwei, Álvaro Siza, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Nicola Samorì.
Curated by Carmelo A. Grasso, Corinna Otto, Ory Dessau.
- MUSEO CORRER
Piazza San Marco
Daily 10 AM-5 PM (last entry 4 PM)
Karen LaMonte. Nocturnes
Through February 28 – Canovian Rooms
The new exhibition cycle Canovian Dialogues opens with four glass sculptures by American artist Karen LaMonte. The works, in shades of blue and gray, depict female garments without the body: empty forms that evoke presence through absence. The sculptures dialogue with Canova’s works, Orpheus and Eurydice and Daedalus and Icarus, creating a dialogue between Neoclassicism and contemporary research. Curated by Chiara Squarcina and Eraldo Mauro.
THERE IS TIME FOR:
- CA’ PESARO – INTERNATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART
Santa Croce 2076
Daily 10 AM-5 PM (last entry 4 PM), closed Monday
Gastone Novelli (1925-1968)
Through March 1
On the centenary of his birth, the retrospective dedicated to Gastone Novelli (Vienna 1925 – Milan 1968) brings together approximately 60 works in the eight rooms on the second floor.
The exhibition originates from the entry into the civic collections of two paintings donated by the heirs: Ice Age (1958) and Lengthen Your Stride My Friend (1967). The exhibition focuses on the period 1957-1968: from the informal works of the years of L’Esperienza Moderna, a magazine founded with Achille Perilli, to the works of the early 1960s in which Novelli developed the synthesis between visual and verbal language, up to the works presented at the 1968 Venice Biennale, when he turned the canvases toward the wall with the inscription “The Biennale is fascist.”
Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Paola Bonani, with the collaboration of the Gastone Novelli Archive of Rome.
- PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION
Dorsoduro 701
Daily 10 AM-6 PM, closed Tuesday
Mani-Fattura: Lucio Fontana’s Ceramics
Through March 2, 2026
Lucio Fontana’s ceramics for the first time in a museum exhibition: approximately 70 works created between Argentina and Italy over four decades. Curated by Sharon Hecker, the exhibition documents a little-known aspect of the artist’s production: figurative sculptures, female portraits (including his wife Teresita Rasini and writer Milena Milani, the only woman signatory of the Manifesto of Spatialism), abstract forms, plates, and crucifixes.
The exhibition is completed by the short film Lucio Fontana’s Ceramics in Milan by Argentine director Felipe Sanguinetti, filmed in the Milanese locations where the artist created works in collaboration with architects such as Osvaldo Borsani, Marco Zanuso, and Roberto Menghi.
- FONDAZIONE QUERINI STAMPALIA
Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252
Tuesday-Sunday 10 AM-6 PM, closed Monday
Ticket included in museum admission querinistampalia.org
The Ephemeral Architectural. Two Installations by Valeriano Pastor and Michelina Michelotto
Through February 8 – Scarpa Area
First event of a project dedicated to contemporary architects who contributed to shaping Palazzo Querini Stampalia after Carlo Scarpa’s 1963 interventions. The exhibition documents the two installations that Valeriano Pastor (1926-2023) and Michelina Michelotto created in 1987 for the exhibitions The Querini Stampalia.
A Family Portrait in Eighteenth-Century Venice and One Hundred Glasses. Glass Works from 1951 to 1987: approximately sixty original drawings and photographs from the Foundation’s archives, the Pastor Michelotto Architects Fund, and the Capovilla Carpentry. In collaboration with Università Iuav di Venezia, with the patronage of the Order of Architects of Venice. Curated by Armando Cattaneo, Maura Manzelle, and Barbara Pastor.
Beautiful Life in Venice
Through April 12
69 paintings by Gabriel Bella (Venice, circa 1730 – 1799), the artist who documented the daily life of eighteenth-century Venice with meticulous, almost photographic precision. Festivals, regattas, public games, political meetings, processions: a visual chronicle of the Serenissima that inspired the poster for Carnival 2026.
Alongside the paintings, prints and volumes from the Library’s historical collection, films from the Istituto Luce (1929-1956), and a film series on Giacomo Casanova.
Disappearing. Antonio Corradini and Luigi Ghirri
Through April 12
A marble medallion with a veiled female face, found in the Foundation’s storage and recognized as an autograph work by Antonio Corradini (Venice, 1688 – Naples, 1752), is the starting point for a dialogue between the Baroque sculptor and photographer Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano, 1943 – Roncocesi, 1992).
Alongside the sculpture, identified as a Veiled Faith, the exhibition brings together for the first time the terracotta sketch for the Veiled Christ commissioned for the Sansevero Chapel in Naples and the marble bust from Ca’ Rezzonico.
The three variations on Corradini’s theme are answered by photographs from the series The Profile of the Clouds from the Luigi Ghirri Fund of the Foundation: landscapes of the Po Valley where fog and diffused light become veils over the visible world.
Curated by Elisabetta Dal Carlo, Lara Marchese, Marta Savaris, Babet Trevisan with Monica De Vincenti.
Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Cover photo: Ca’ Pesaro – Novelli 2025 by Irene Fanizza.
