Contemporary art in a Venetian customs house
MúzeumCafé 12.
On 6 June 2009 Venice’s newest museum opened for the public in Punta della Dogana with the exhibition Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection. Charles Ray’s statue Boy with Frog is a signpost for the new museum. The sculpture has generated controversy from the moment of its unveiling. Some regard the naked figure dangling a sizeable frog in front of his face simply as a provocation. Others regard it as symbolising the world of water and renewal, the meeting of traditional and contemporary artistic expression, or a witty response to the challenge which the art of the past presents for a contemporary artist at the beginning of the third millennium. In recent times the Peggy Guggenheim’s museum in the snow-white palace looking onto the Canale Grande and the Palazzo Grassi beyond have added to the city’s already colourful plethora of galleries. One of the world’s richest collectors, François Pinault, had chosen the palace – after he could not agree with the Paris municipality about building a museum on an island of the Seine – for displaying part of his collection. The interior was transformed to the design of the renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando and in 2006 the first large exhibition of the Pinault collection was held under the title Where are We Going? In July 2006 the city of Venice invited tenders for restoration of the Punta della Dogana building with a view to transforming it into a centre of contemporary art. The result was made public in April 2007 and on 8 June François Pinault representing the winning Palazzo Grassi signed a contract of cooperation for 33 years with the city of Venice. Tadao Ando’s designs were revealed to the public at the same time. By then the huge row of buildings in the vicinity of salt warehouses on the top of the Dorsoduro had been empty for 30 years. The first thing Tadao Ando did was to remove the traces of additions and reconstructions made at different times and in various styles, and return to the basics as defined by four materials – brick, white Istrian limestone, wood making up the roof structure and large-size roof tiles. By emphasising these elements a large homogenous interior could be created and the organic unit realised by the Punta della Dogana and its neighbouring 17th-century church could be regained for the perspective of the viewer outside. From whichever direction you arrive on the water of the Bacino di San Marco, the complex is a defining feature of the view, somewhat creating a gateway together with the buildings of St. Mark’s Square on the opposite side as the Canale Grande becomes wider. This is the third large-scale design Tadao Ando, who was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995, has created for Francois Pinault. His building housing contemporary art is set in a unified natural, historic, architectural and art history context. Austrian artist Rudolf Stingel’s large pictures with their grey tones almost melting into the background are displayed on the walls of the central block. Stingel, who was born in 1956 in Merano, South Tyrol, today lives in New York. Both his personality and his work represent a link between the exhibits of established artists who are internationally famous (Sigmar Polke, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Maurizio Cattellan) and those by young talents such as Adel Abdessemed and Mark Bradford. The concept of the exhibition appears in an emblematic manner in Stingel’s works as well as in the title of the exhibition, Mapping the Studio.