DiarySo CLOSE

Apr 19, 2024 | artforum.com | Pablo Larios |PREJUDICEBy Pablo Larios |Travis Jeppesen |DiarySo CLOSE

For viewers (this correspondent included) who were unable to sort out the registration to visit the Holy See pavilion—at the Giudecca Women’s prison, and with Vatican-grade security (the pope himself is due to visit on Saturday)—I urge a visit, just across the Giudecca canal, to Bulgaria’s impassioned excavation of the psychological afterlives of political imprisonment.

Apr 19, 2024 | artforum.com | Travis Jeppesen |Pablo Larios |DiarySo CLOSE |PREJUDICEBy Pablo Larios

Eddie Martinez at San Marino pavilion: Micro-nation enthusiasts, unite! Because if there has to be such a thing as countries, then they should be as tiny as possible. Though there’s nothing diminutive about the paintings and sculptures of American artist Eddie Martinez, who was chosen to represent this cute little Italy-enclosed splotch. Martinez’s own splotches, loaded with chromatic charisma and interlaid with dashing and rhythmical linework, are verdant, fruitful, and sexy as hell.

Apr 18, 2024 | artforum.com | Pablo Larios |Travis Jeppesen |DiarySo CLOSE |Wu Jianru

“I WANT TO TURN THE VIEWERS INTO FOREIGNERS,” Tesfaye Urgessa says to me. We’re in one of the baroque rooms in Venice’s Palazzo Bollani near San Marco, where, this week, the Addis Ababa–based painter is the first to represent Ethiopia in its debut official Venice pavilion. I tell Urgessa that his new oil paintings—scenes of lost, anxious domesticity, where lean, fragmented bodies flash with bold strips of color on angular sofas and carpets—are outstanding.

Apr 18, 2024 | artforum.com | Travis Jeppesen |Pablo Larios |DiarySo CLOSE |Wu Jianru

Trevor Yeung at the Hong Kong pavilion: The only artist I’m aware of whose chief medium has been horticulture. Yet for his Venice show he has shifted to water, appropriately enough, in a new series of installations, including Cave of Avoidance (Not Yours), 2024—a roomful of pink-lit fish tanks containing various ceramic objects sculpted out of terra-cotta soil—whose overall aesthetic was inspired by 1990s Hong Kong pet shops, according to curator Olivia Chow.

Apr 17, 2024 | artforum.com | Travis Jeppesen |DiarySo CLOSE |Wu Jianru

ALWAYS START YOUR DAY with something you know you’re gonna like. For me, that usually entails a book and a quadruple espresso: a luxury I can’t afford when I’ve been tasked with seeing as much of the Venice Biennale—“Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa—and its multitudinous collateral exhibitions and events as possible within three days.