Venice Biennale Opening Week Turned the City Into an Art-World Crossroads
The 61st Venice Biennale began with the kind of density only Venice can produce: exhibitions, receptions, and chance encounters compressed into a few feverish days. By the end of the week, the city felt less like a sequence of venues than a moving social map, with collectors, curators, dealers, artists, and patrons crossing canals and slipping between palazzos late into the night.
The opening days brought a steady stream of high-profile sightings. Former Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry was seen helping with vaporetto directions between Michael Armitage’s survey at Palazzo Grassi and Matthew Wong’s exhibition across the Grand Canal. Jewel, the American singer-songwriter who has sold 30 million albums, arrived in Venice for the opening of “Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost,” her visual art project.
Hotel Metropole on the Riva degli Schiavoni became one of the week’s central gathering points. Michèle Lamy moved through the garden with an entourage, while New York dealers Andrew Kreps and Stefania Bortolami worked their phones in the lobby. Bracha Ettinger and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gave interviews there around the clock, and Perrotin hosted a party for Alma Allen’s U.S. pavilion presentation. Hauser & Wirth, meanwhile, launched the catalogue raisonné for Fabio Mauri, edited by Christov-Bakargiev.
On San Giorgio Maggiore, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini hosted another layer of the week’s social choreography. Thaddaeus Ropac’s reception for Georg Baselitz’s monumental final paintings drew figures including Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Emilia Kabakov, whose own collateral exhibition was also in town. Individual works by Baselitz were priced as high as $1.5 million. The following night, François Pinault lit the white marble façade of the Palladio basilica for his annual party, with guests including Selma Hayek, Lorna Simpson, JR, Paloma Picasso, and Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Not every invitation was easy to secure. Florentina Holzinger’s Austrian pavilion, with its flooded toilets, jet skis, and nudity, was among the week’s most talked-about destinations. Elsewhere, Liza Essers of Goodman Gallery offered a more measured reading of Venice’s logic over breakfast at the Gabrielli Hotel: “You can’t be too attached to your agenda.” In a city built on collisions and detours, that may be the most useful advice of all.
The Biennale’s opening week remains the art world’s most concentrated expression of being together — part exhibition circuit, part social theater, and part reminder that Venice still rewards the unexpected.
