Palazzo Fortuny
9th June – 7th October 2007

The idea of such great exhibition, conceived thanks to the cooperation between the City of Venice – Venetian Civic Museums and Axel Vervoordt - examines the relationship between art, time and their power of display, representing a breadth of various periods, places, trends and languages.

Over 300 objects are on show, ranging from rare and extremely precious archaeological materials to contemporary installations: they will be sourced from Axel Vervoordt’s large and eclectic collections, from the Venetian Civic Museums and from other public and private collections. The works of over eighty artists will include Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, James Turrell, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol.

Artempo aims to explore time and…

Artempo aims to explore time and how it operates, forms and transforms art and at the same time it examines the universal, timeless language of art. The exhibition will be housed in the Venetian Gothic Palazzo Fortuny, which Mariano Fortuny turned into a showroom-home, of which there are still the former living spaces, structures, tapestries and collections. For the first time, after decades, the whole building will share both the exhibition and living spaces with the public, in order to highlight its role as a ‘laboratory of ideas’, just like Fortuny himself had conceived it, while its very atmosphere plays an important role by highlighting the interplay, proposed by the exhibition, between works of art and everyday objects derived from different places, cultures and historical periods. Artempo will include several specially commissioned exhibition installations: El Anatsui (Ghana) will create a tapestry of empty tins to cover the whole facade of the Palace, Loris Cecchini (Italy) will create a tree out of reflectors on an additional facade, Anish Kapoor (India) will make a 12-metre mirrored wall. New works of art and installations will be provided by Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgium), Klaus Munch (Italy), Tatsuo Miyajima (Japan), Jorge Molder (Portugal), Thomas Schutte (Germany), Dominique Stroobant (Italy), Shiro Tsujimura (Japan), James Turrell (USA).