Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana reopen on Saturday 11 July

Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana reopen on Saturday 11 July.

Palazzo Grassi presents ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu’, co-organised with the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Based on a project conceived and coordinated by Matthieu Humery, the exhibition looks at how the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) is viewed by five different curators, focusing particularly on the ‘Master Collection’, a selection of 385 images that the artist himself chose in the early 1970s, upon the request of his friends and collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil, as the most significant of his work. Today there are five copies of this extraordinary set.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz, film director Wim Wenders, writer Javier Cercas, the General Conservator and Director of the Prints and Photography Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Sylvie Aubenas, and collector François Pinault have been invited to select fifty works each from the original ‘Master Collection’.

Through their selection, each curator shares his or her vision of this major artist’s photography and work. The scope of this unique project is thus to renew and enrich our view on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work through the respective ones of five personalities.

The exhibition ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson. Le Grand Jeu’ will be presented at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Paris, in spring 2021.

As well as the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition – which will occupy the first floor of the exhibition space – Palazzo Grassi will also host a monographic exhibition dedicated to artist Youssef Nabil (Cairo, 1972), titled ‘Once Upon a Dream’, and curated by Matthieu Humery and Jean-Jacques Aillagon.

Made after an ancient technique widely used for family portraits or film posters that once featured on the streets of Cairo, Youssef Nabil’s hand-painted photographs revive a legendary Egypt, between symbolism and abstraction.

The search for the sources of identity, the ideological, social and political concerns of the twenty-first century, and melancholy for a distant past are key themes driving Nabil’s artistic persona. Organised into thematic sections showing the artist’s earliest work through to his most recent production, the exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in the artist’s progression. Further insights are provided by the artist’s film production through the presentation of his three videos Arabian Happy Ending, I Saved My Belly Dancer and You Never Left.

Punta della Dogana presents the exhibition ‘Untitled, 2020’, conceived and curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Muna El Fituri and the artist Thomas Houseago.

Five years after ‘Slip of the Tongue’, conceived by Danh Vo and Caroline Bourgeois and presented at Punta della Dogana in 2015, this is the second time that an artist of the Pinault Collection has been invited to present his personal view of the collection. Conceived especially for the spaces of Punta della Dogana, ‘Untitled, 2020’ is organised into themes and presents the works of more than 60 artists held by the Pinault Collection, international museums and private collections. Accompanied by a wealth of references and quotes and ranging from the twentieth century through to the present day, the works set up a dialogue that triggers emotional, sensory, visual and tactile connections.

Covering a broad range of expressive media, from sculpture to video, and painting to photography, the works on view revolve around the recreation of Thomas Houseago’s studio in Tadao Ando’s cube room, in the heart of Punta della Dogana. In this space, the artist makes available to visitors his library and the sources of his inspiration through a site-specific installation.