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So potently provocative is director Cecilia Alemani’s vision for a feminised Venice Biennale that, almost a month before the event, the effect was already pronounced in the city’s early-launching off-site shows.
Alemani’s exhibition The Milk of Dreams, titled after a fairy tale by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, will include just 21 men out of 213 names. It prioritises “women and gender nonconforming artists” who are challenging “the figure of men as the centre of the universe”. National pavilions follow her lead — almost all will show women artists — and, as has never happened before, female artists have snagged many of the city’s prestigious historic private venues, transforming our experience of some glorious sites.
A tiny canvas, “Kissed”, hangs alone on the vast piano nobile loggia at Palazzo Grassi. The sky is reflected on a woman’s face, paler and darker reds blend into the contours of a couple. The colours glint down the grand staircase, but you have to draw close for the image to cohere. Flamboyant yet restrained, Marlene Dumas’ games with pictorial legibility are as seductive as her inky, fluid, sensual brushwork.
Dumas’ show is the first devoted to a woman artist at François Pinault’s neoclassical palace. She engages with the space to stage a drama of opposites — architectural monumentality disquieted by painterly intimacy. Her subjects, love and death, are ambitious, but her best pieces tend to be small, concentrating a voluptuousness which plays on all the senses, distorting scale for emotive effect. Lips breathe on giant petals touching skin in “Scent of a Flower”. “Tombstone Lovers”, ghostly as a fading grave sculpture, captures stone-cold texture, but impassioned drawing carries the heat of erotic memory. A toxic-hued rodent fills the picture plane in “Rat”, painted during the pandemic, suggesting fear, disgust, distrust.