FVTVRIST GUIDES//
Venice 2025: Notes by Anna S. (Fvtvrist)
The 82nd Venice International Film Festival (27 August – 6 September 2025) sets the tone. Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia opened the festival with an austere meditation on politics and mortality—an aging president trapped between public duty and private despair. Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein erupted with gothic pathos, its ovation echoing like a ritual in the Sala Grande. Lanthimos (Bugonia), Guadagnino (After the Hunt), Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice), Safdie (The Smashing Machine), and Jarmusch (Father Mother Sister Brother) complete a program.
And because Venice is never merely a backdrop but another milestone in the endless pilgrimage of artists and art lovers, we decided to share with you our recommendations: the exhibitions, collections, and encounters that shape the city into a living manuscript of contemporary culture.
My own journey through Venice was marked by three sites that now seem like premonitions of the present: Collezione Ama Venezia (27.8 – 2.11.2025), Tatiana Trouvé at Palazzo Grassi (06.04.2025 – 04.01.2026), and Thomas Schütte at Punta della Dogana (06.04.2025 – 23.11.2025). What I experienced reverberates now, intensified by the simultaneity of Biennale and Film Festival, so if you find yourself in Venice this days, we invite you to traverse these exhibitions as part of the city’s living score.
VERY VENICE 2025
Collezione Ama Venezia
In Cannaregio, a former soap factory has been stripped and reimagined into one of the city’s boldest new art spaces. The foundation is the creation of collector Laurent Asscher, and its arrival shifts the balance of power: Venice is no longer just Pinault and Prada territory, there’s a new player on the map.
The inaugural exhibition (27.8 – 2.11.2025) is less about harmony than confrontation. Marden, Hammons, Koons, Stingel share the floor with Refik Anadol and Lauren Halsey. The mix is abrasive on purpose: minimalist austerity clashing with digital spectacle, conceptual rigor colliding with Afrofuturist urbanism.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space (12.04 – 15.09.2025). Curated by Flavia Frigeri (National Portrait Gallery, London), this is the first major Italian show of the Portuguese-born French painter (1908–1992). Around seventy works arrive from MoMA, Tate, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim New York, and key private collections.
Vieira da Silva’s language pulls from Portugal’s decorative traditions but also Cubism and Futurism, fusing abstraction and figuration into real and imagined worlds. Labyrinth inside labyrinth. One of the strongest shows in Venice right now.
Pinault Collection
Thomas Schütte: Genealogies (06.04 – 23.11.2025) at Punta della Dogana opens with Mutter Erde, a monumental bronze whose eyes glow after dark—half statue, half night watchman. Brilliant! Inside, Schütte throws categories out the window: clay, bronze, and glass figures swinging between monument and wreckage, power and fragility.
Across the canal, Tatiana Trouvé: The Strange Life of Things (06.04.2025 – 04.01.2026) at Palazzo Grassi begins with Hors-sol, a black asphalt floor embedded with manhole covers from Paris, Rome, New York—an urban constellation underfoot. Empty chairs act as ghostly hosts, drawings fracture time, sculptures erode before your eyes. Trouvé is one of the sharpest philosophical voices in contemporary art—and one of my favourites.
The Venice Biennale of Architecture (10 May – 28 September 2025)
The Biennale divides itself between the Giardini—national pavilions in their permanent homes—and the Arsenale, the old shipyard turned endless exhibition spine. Forget the idea of “seeing it all.” Take the vaporetto, walk in, and surrender to the overload. This year’s Architecture Biennale, Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective. curated by Carlo Ratti, pushes Venice into the present tense: AI, robotics, biomaterials, speculative futures. At the Arsenale, one moment you’re standing in a Belgian forest built indoors, the next you’re caught in Terms and Conditions—a mirrored hall packed with air-conditioners and water pools, a claustrophobic image of climate anxiety.
Galleries & Spaces
· Fondazione Prada Venice — Ca’ Corner della Regina, a baroque palazzo turned contemporary think-tank.
· Fondazione Querini Stampalia — mixes historic collections with contemporary interventions.
· Palazzo Fortuny — atmospheric, multidisciplinary, where contemporary shows meet textile and design history.
· SMAC Venice (San Marco Art Centre) — inside Procuratie Vecchie.
· Victoria Miro Venice (San Marco) — the gallery’s Italian outpost, showing Yayoi Kusama, Grayson Perry, Idris Khan, and other international heavyweights.
· Galleria Alberta Pane (Dorsoduro) — focused on conceptual, installation, and socially engaged practices.
· Fondazione Berengo / Glasstress (Murano) — hybrid between foundation and commercial platform, pushing glass into the contemporary art market with collaborations (Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, Tony Cragg).
Arty Spots - Where People Meet
· Bar Paradiso Perduto (Cannaregio) — cult spot for artists, writers, and locals.
· Palazzina Grassi (San Marco) — Philippe Starck–designed hotel and bar. Sleek, glossy, a Biennale party hub.
· Venice Venice Hotel (Ca’ da Mosto, Grand Canal) — the new hotspot. Postvenezianità concept, art-meets-fashion crowd.
· Harry’s Bar (San Marco) — the old-school classic.
· Paradiso (Giardini) — the Biennale café/bar right at the Giardini entrance. Arty chaos, endless spritz, everyone you need to meet eventually passes through.
Between the Film Festival’s red carpets and the Biennale’s pavilions, between galleries, foundations, private collections and museums, Venice performs itself. And when you’ve had your fill of spritzes and spectacle, take the vaporetto to San Michele Cemetery. Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Brodsky, Ezra Pound—all resting on Mauro Codussi’s floating necropolis. The architecture alone is worth it. In Venice, even the afterlife comes curated.
And if you want something more personal yet, reach out to FVTVRIST: send us a DM in Instagram, and we’ll guide you to the shows, spaces and private events you can’t miss while you’re here.