When I visited Venice last September, I almost missed the modern art exhibition “Where are we going?” in the impressive Palazzo Grassi at the Canal Grande. I had dragged my mum there solely for the fact that it was Tadao Ando who had renovated the Palazzo (even though I quit my architecture course some years ago, my love for Ando lasts). But already being there, and seeing the signs and posters and Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog (Magenta)” floating outside on the canal (see picture above), we decided to pay the admission charge and take a closer look. My mum wasn’t that impressed (she preferred the Peggy Guggenheim Collection) but I loved it! Generally speaking, it was very colorful, very kitschy, very bold, very, well, modern. There were a lot of exhibits I liked, too many to name them all, for example the installation “Vintage Violence” by Urs Fischer, David Hammons’s sculptures or the paintings by Cy Twombly.
It wasn’t until after my return that I found out that the Palazzo Grassi and the works of art it contains belong to François Pinault, a French billionaire (and future father-in-law of Salma Hayek). He tried to have a new museum built in Paris, but after this plan didn’t work out, he decided to opt for Venice and the Palazzo Grassi instead – where the new exhibition of the Collection Pinault starts today! It is called “Sequence 1: Painting and Sculpture from the François Pinault Collection” and is going to last until November 11th. You can read more about it on Spiegel Online (if you can read German, that is). Urs Fischer and David Hammons are there again, with different pieces this time. As for what I like, I can’t really tell on the sole basis of the small pictures on the website (the “Flying Curve” by Kristin Baker looks intriguing though). I’d really love to go to Venice again to visit this exhibition, maybe I can persuade my mum a second time.