The British pavilion houses Great Britain's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
The British pavilion houses Great Britain's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
The Venice Biennale is an international art biennial exhibition held in Venice, Italy. Often described as "the Olympics of the art world", participation in the Biennale is a prestigious event for contemporary artists. The festival has become a constellation of shows: a central exhibition curated by that year's artistic director, national pavilions hosted by individual nations, and independent exhibitions throughout Venice. The Biennale parent organization also hosts regular festivals in other arts: architecture, dance, film, music, and theater. [1]
Outside of the central, international exhibition, individual nations produce their own shows, known as pavilions, as their national representation. Nations that own their pavilion buildings, such as the 30 housed on the Giardini, are responsible for their own upkeep and construction costs as well. Nations without dedicated buildings create pavilions in venues throughout the city. [1]
The British pavilion was designed by the architect Edwin Alfred Rickards and built in 1909 on the site of an older building, a café-restaurant constructed in 1887. The pavilion's design invokes 18th-century, Italianate-style, English country houses. [2]
Since 1937 the British Council has been responsible for the pavilion. [3] Financial support for the pavilion comes from a combination of public funds, via the British Council, and private sponsors, including Burberry. The decision of art fair and magazine brand Frieze to sponsor the British pavilion in 2024 marks the first time that an art fair has provided funding for a national pavilion at the Biennale. [4]
Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977.
The Venice Biennale is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy, by the Biennale Foundation. It focuses on contemporary art, and includes events for art, contemporary dance, architecture, cinema, and theatre. Two main components of the festival are known as the Art Biennale and the Architecture Biennale, which are held in alternating years. The others – Biennale Musica, Biennale Teatro, Venice Film Festival, and Venice Dance Biennale – are held annually. The main exhibition held in Castello alternates between art and architecture, and there are around 30 permanent pavilions built by different countries.
Harald Szeemann was a Swiss curator, artist, and art historian. Having curated more than 200 exhibitions, many of which have been characterized as groundbreaking, Szeemann is said to have helped redefine the role of an art curator. It is believed that Szeemann elevated curating to a legitimate art form itself.
Lisson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967. The gallery represents over 50 artists such as Art & Language, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Richard Long, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth, Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon and Ai Weiwei.
Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, is a British-Indian sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor attended the elite all-boys Indian boarding school The Doon School, before moving to the United Kingdom to begin his art training at Hornsey College of Art and, later, Chelsea School of Art and Design.
Shirazeh Houshiary is an Iranian-born English sculptor, installation artist, and painter. She lives and works in London.
Established in 1950, the List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) is the contemporary art museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known for temporary exhibitions in its galleries located in the MIT Media Lab building, as well as its administration of the permanent art collection distributed throughout the university campus, faculty offices, and student housing.
Alison Mary Wilding OBE, RA is an English artist noted for her multimedia abstract sculptures. Wilding's work has been displayed in galleries internationally.
The Cass Sculpture Foundation was a charitable commissioning body based in Goodwood, Sussex, England. The Foundation's 26-acre grounds were home to an ever-changing display of 80 monumental sculptures, all of which were available for sale with the proceeds going directly to artists. The Foundation was a self-sufficient body reliant on sales of commissioned sculptures and visitor entrance fees.
New British Sculpture is the name given to the work of a group of artists, sculptors and installation artists who began to exhibit together in London, England, in the early 1980s, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Shirazeh Houshiary, and Richard Wentworth.
Aperto ’93 is the title of an exhibition of contemporary art conceived by Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, and organized by Helena Kontova for the XLV edition of the Venice Biennale, directed by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1993. It reprised and expanded the concept of the exhibition Aperto, a new section in the Biennale for young artists ideated by Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann in 1980.
Glasstress is a recurring exhibition that brings together art by contemporary artists made with glass. Launched in 2009 as a collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale of Arts by Adriano Berengo as a way of showcasing the works produced by Berengo Studio, it has since had editions take place in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2022.
Matthew Joseph Williams Drutt is an American curator and writer who specializes in modern and contemporary art and design. Based in New York, he has owned and operated his independent consulting practice Drutt Creative Arts Management (DCAM) since 2013. He is currently working with the Lee Ufan Foundation in Arles on an exhibition of non-objective art for Fall 2024. More recently, he worked with the Nationalmuseum Stockholm on an exhibition and publication of modern and contemporary American crafts gifted from artists and collectors in the United States to the museum, originally organized by his mother, Helen Drutt. He has worked more recently with the Eckbo Foundation in Oslo on the first major monograph of Thorwald Hellesen published in English and Norwegian in by Arnoldsche Art Publishers. He is currently also developing several other titles with the publisher. Formerly, he worked with the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland (2013–2016) and the State Hermitage Museum in Russia (2013–2014), consulting on exhibitions, publications, and collections. He continues to serve as an Advisory Curator to the Hermitage Museum Foundation Israel. In 2006, the French Government awarded him the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2003, his exhibition Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism won Best Monographic Exhibition Organized Nationally from the International Association of Art Critics.
The 44th Venice Biennale, held in 1990, was an exhibition of international contemporary art, with 49 participating nations. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Prizewinners of the 44th Biennale included: Giovanni Anselmo and Bernd and Hilla Becher, the American pavilion with Jenny Holzer, and Anish Kapoor.
The German pavilion houses Germany's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
The Austrian pavilion is a national pavilion of the Venice Biennale. It houses Austria's official representation during the Biennale.
The national pavilions host each participant nation's official representation during the Venice Biennale, an international art biennial exhibition held in Venice, Italy. Some countries own pavilion buildings in the Giardini della Biennale while others rent buildings throughout the city, but each country controls its own selection process and production costs.
The Swiss pavilion houses Switzerland's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
The Romanian pavilion houses Romania's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
Ghana Freedom was a Ghanaian art exhibition at the 2019 Venice Biennale, an international contemporary art biennial in which countries represent themselves through self-organizing national pavilions. The country's debut pavilion, also known as the Ghana pavilion, was highly anticipated and named a highlight of the overall Biennale by multiple journalists. The six participating artists—Felicia Abban, John Akomfrah, El Anatsui, Selasi Awusi Sosu, Ibrahim Mahama, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—represented a range of artist age, gender, locations, and prestige, selected by curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim. The show paired young and old artists across sculpture, filmmaking, and portraiture, and emphasized common threads across postcolonial Ghanaian culture in both its current inhabitants and the diaspora. Almost all of the art was commissioned specifically for the pavilion. Architect David Adjaye designed the pavilion with rusty red walls of imported soil to reflect the cylindrical, earthen dwellings of the Gurunsi within the Biennale's Arsenale exhibition space. The project was supported by the Ghana Ministry of Tourism and advised by former Biennale curator Okwui Enwezor. After the show's run, May–November 2019, works from the exhibition were set to display in Accra, Ghana's capital.
