Venice Biennale 2026 Expands Across the City With New Island, Street, and Canal Projects
Venice’s 2026 Biennale season is taking shape as a citywide sequence of interventions that move well beyond the traditional exhibition circuit. From a restored island outpost to a street suspended with paintings and a return of monumental glass along the Grand Canal, the projects point to a Biennale increasingly defined by ecology, public space, and international exchange.
The most ambitious of the new venues is San Giacomo, where collector and arts patron Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s years-long redevelopment will open on 7 May. The restored Napoleonic-era powder magazines, unused since the 1960s, have been converted into exhibition spaces. The inaugural program will feature Matt Copson’s first Italian solo exhibition, centered on installations that use theatrical devices to consider life cycles and existential questions, alongside a concurrent group show drawn from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection. Several works in that presentation are site-specific commissions shaped by the island’s shifting ecology.
Another project, Melissa McGill’s Marea, will bring around 100 paintings to Corte Nova from 30 April to 10 May. Created with residents and students from Università Iuav di Venezia, the works will be strung above the street between the Biennale Gardens and the Arsenale. Rendered in lagoon blues and greens, the installation turns a familiar domestic scene into a civic gesture, linking Venice’s visual identity to the rising tides and climate pressures that threaten it. Support from the Italian National Commission for Unesco and the Italian Ambassador to the US underscores the project’s public urgency.
Dale Chihuly also returns to Venice with Chihuly: Venice 2026, opening on 5 May at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti and running until 14 November. The exhibition combines institutional framing with spectacle, including three monumental installations along the Grand Canal visible from the Accademia Bridge. Among them is Gold Tower (2025), installed in Palazzo Franchetti and rising 30 feet with undulating, luminous forms. Presented by Pilchuck Glass School and the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, the project revisits the artist’s 1990s Venetian chapter.
Wallace Chan’s Vessels of Other Worlds opens on 8 May in the Chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà and continues through 18 October. The installation features three titanium sculptures modeled on Olea Sancta vessels, with suspended elements that suggest oil droplets in motion. A parallel exhibition will open on 18 July at the Long Museum in Shanghai, extending the project into a transcontinental dialogue.
Together, these projects suggest that Venice’s Biennale season is becoming less a single event than a dispersed cultural geography, one in which the city itself remains the central medium.
