7 Standout Venice Biennale Artists Exhibiting around the World This Year
Ione Saldanha, installation view in “Foreigners Everywhere” at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo by Matteo deMayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
The Venice Biennale—the influential, temperature-taking art world event—is known to have a monumental impact on featured artists’ careers. This year is no different, as the artists of national pavilions and Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere,” on view through November 24th, are already gaining momentum.
This influence is beginning to expand beyond the Venetian Lagoon, with many galleries opting to show these artists as part of their spring and summer programming. So, good news: Even those who won’t visit Venice this year will have a chance to see some of these artists’ works firsthand, from ceramics drawing on Indigenous Paraguayan culture to pioneering abstract paintings. Here, we’ve rounded up current and upcoming solo shows by some of the standout artists on view in Venice’s national pavilions and main exhibition.
One of the Biennale’s most exciting displays is a huge exploration of abstraction outside the Western context, presented as part of the main exhibition. Fluid forms, unconventional color pairings, and off-kilter sculptural shapes abound. Among these works, Anwar Jalal Shemza’s painting Composition in Red, Green and Yellow (1963) is exemplary, featuring repetitive semicircle shapes in the titular shades.
The artist and writer, who was born in Simla, India, and spent much of his life in the U.K., is best known for his abstract works. Hales Gallery is showing another side of the artist in its London space, with a presentation of portraits that opened in April just ahead of the Biennale. “Heads” presents Shemza’s early works from the 1950s—mostly gestural gouache pieces that show the unmistakable influence of Paul Klee.
Ione Saldanha, installation view of “The Time and The Color,” 2024. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein. Courtesy of Salon 94.
Also included in the Biennale’s mélange of non-Western abstraction are several sculptures by the late Brazilian artist Ione Saldanha. Dangling in the center of a room in the Giardini, these “Bambus” sculptures are formed from stalks of bamboo, unevenly ringed with acrylic paint in bright, contrasting colors. Though these works are entirely abstract explorations of color and form, they faintly recall the more figurative themes of the artist’s career, including city life. Though Saldanha began by depicting the urban environments of Ouro Preto and Salvador in Brazil, her block-like buildings grew evermore stylized, until the horizontal strips in her paintings and sculptures became pure geometric expression.
Despite Saldanha’s pioneering approach to abstraction—inspired, but not defined by her time in Europe—the artist has received very little acknowledgement from the international art world. “The Time and the Color” at Salon 94 in New York is her first-ever solo exhibition in the U.S., and includes paintings from the 1950s to ’80s.
Samia Halaby, installation view of “Fragments of time” at Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg.
Another standout from the Biennale’s exploration of abstraction is Palestinian painter Samia Halaby, who was awarded a special mention by the Biennale’s jury for her contribution to “Foreigners Everywhere.” Her work in the exhibition, an oil painting entitled Black is Beautiful (1969), features a perfectly rounded cross that appears to expand out of the canvas towards the viewer, trompe l’oeil–style, with a precise gradient of shading in peach, orange, and navy.
The work’s play with perception is typical of Halaby’s decades-long painting practice. Her work has focused on Islamic architectural forms and bright, hard-edge abstraction, and often looks almost computer-generated. Indeed, in 1983, the artist taught herself to code, building animated digital movies that she refers to as “kinetic paintings” and produced live during performances. In Halaby’s current show at Sfeir-Semler, “Fragments of time,” her mesmerizing oil paintings are shown alongside smaller digital works, drawing out the influence that coding has had on her practice more broadly.
An astonishing 7 million beads are used in “Trinket,” Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition for the Canadian pavilion at the Biennale. Huge, curtain-like swathes made up of tiny blue glass orbs caress the building’s exterior brick walls, evoking Venice’s history as a center of glass manufacturing and the beads’ historical commodification within a global, colonial network of trade. Kiwanga’s works are frequently research-heavy, drawing on her background as an anthropologist, and this pavilion, which was created in collaboration with Zimbabwean and Canadian artisans, is no different.
At Goodman Gallery in New York, a selection of the artist’s recent series is on view: experiments in sisal (a type of fiber that Kiwanga has worked with extensively), as well as glass lenses blown from silica. These works highlight the same themes that Kiwanga’s presentation at the Biennale pinpoints so effectively: the impact of colonial capitalism on the materials that shape our world, and the symbolic weight of even the most miniature object.
This is the first year that Ethiopia has participated in the Venice Biennale, presenting paintings by the rising artist Tesfaye Urgessa, fresh off his inclusion in The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024. Curated by the author Lemn Sissay, Urgessa’s presentation “Prejudice and Belonging” at the Palazzo Bollani features elongated figures that express the alienation the artist felt as a Black immigrant living in Germany. (He has since moved back to his hometown, Addis Ababa.) “I was raising questions about what is it like to be a foreigner? And what is it like to belong?” he said, of the pavilion.
At Saatchi Yates, which represents Urgessa, 14 new paintings in the artist’s signature style are on show. Nude, tangled limbs and distorted bodies drip down his canvases, with motifs such as irons, airplanes, and knee-high boots marching across the background.
Julia Isídrez, installation view in “Foreigners Everywhere” at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo by Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
In the Arsenale, as part of the Biennale’s main exhibition, stands a series of large ceramic pots by Paraguayan artist Julia Isídrez, decorated with cloudy patterns in unflashy earth tones and dotted with small spines, limbs, and animal heads that evoke the fauna of her homeland. Accompanying them is another series of smaller vessels in terracotta shades. These were made by the artist’s mother, Juana Marta Rodas, who passed the traditional ceramic techniques of her Indigenous Guaraní ancestors on to her daughter, and passed away in 2013.
This summer, Isídrez’s work will get its first New York exhibition at Kasmin, where it will reach a new audience—demonstrating the impact that the Venice Biennale can have for artists like Isidrez, who is little-known outside her home country.
Lauren Halsey, installation view in “Foreigners Everywhere” at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo by Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
The pale, totemic concrete pillars of Lauren Halsey’s “keepers of the krown” series, on view by the end of the Arsenale’s outdoor waterside area, seem like a relic from the past, etched with banded friezes and topped with sculpted capitals. Take another look and they become more personal and contemporary, referencing the vernacular images and language of South Central Los Angeles, Halsey’s hometown. The faces that appear on the columns’ capitals, for example, are depictions of Black activists and changemakers in the area, and commercial slogans and slang are etched in graffiti-style text along with references to ancient Egypt.
The series is linked to Halsey’s recent installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2023), and her current show at Gagosian in Paris draws on the same body of work. Here, wall-mounted reliefs take their imagery and themes from a similar range of sources, combining a sense of local community with a sweeping Afrofuturist vision. The show also includes several new, foil-based wall works that collage together vibrant commercial imagery and photographs.
