Anish Kapoor in Venice at the Accademia Galleries. From 20 April to 9 October 2022, in conjunction with the next International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, the Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia is dedicating an extraordinary exhibition to the great internationally recognized artist , Anish Kapoor. The exhibition will be retrospective, presenting key moments in the artist's career alongside a new body of unpublished works. For the first time, the highly innovative new works, created using carbon nanotechnology, will be exhibited, as well as the recent paintings and sculptures that testify to the vitality and visionary drive of Kapoor 's current artistic production.

As announced today, 12 November 2021, during the press conference held at the Galleries, in the presence of the Director Giulio Manieri Elia , the curator of the exhibition, Taco Dibbits and Anish Kapoor , the exhibition itinerary will be enriched with a second and prestigious venue: the historic Palazzo Manfrin, in the Cannaregio district of Venice, to whose collection originally belonged a significant nucleus of masterpieces now exhibited in the Museum.

Palazzo Manfrin, purchased in 1788 by Count Girolamo Manfrin, a wealthy tobacco merchant, who had transformed the first floor of the building into an art gallery, was considered for its collection of paintings, but also of sculptures, books and prints, a sort of “completion of the Venetian painting heritage exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts”. The Gallery had in fact become one of the major tourist attractions of Venice, visited, among others, by Antonio Canova, Lord Byron, John Ruskin and Edouard Manet.

When, around the middle of the nineteenth century, the works of the collection were sold, after the death of Manfrin, the heritage of the Gallerie dell'Accademia was enriched with twenty-one paintings including some of his major masterpieces: La Tempesta and La Vecchia di Giorgione , in addition to works of great quality such as the San Giorgio by Andrea Mantegna and the Portrait of a young man by Hans Memling , the Madonna enthroned with the Child and a devotee by Nicolò di Pietro, I Santi Paolo e Antonio eremiti by Girolamo Savoldo, San Pietro and San Giovani Battista by Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto.