Julie Mehretu: Ensemble / Pierre Huyghe: Liminal

Julie Mehretu: Ensemble
With Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin
Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Julie Mehretu

Palazzo Grassi presents Ensemble, the largest exhibition of Julie Mehretu's work to date in Europe.

Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, in collaboration with the artist (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1970), the exhibition brings together a selection of more than fifty works, between painting and printmaking, that Julie Mehretu produced over the timespan of 25 years, including several of the artist’s recent paintings from 2021–2024. Presented over two floors of Palazzo Grassi, the exhibition unites 17 works from the Pinault Collection, as well as loans from international museums and private collections.

The exhibition is punctuated by the presence of the works by some of her closest artist friends, with whom she has developed a powerful affinity over the years and with whom she has exchanged and collaborated. Organised following a principle of visual echoes, this exhibition is conceived as a free, non-chronological journey through Julie Mehretu’s work. It allows us to explore her artistic practice, to understand both how it came into being and how it is constantly renewed.

The palimpsest of her work, forming multiple surfaces images, echoes with the collective dimension, the idea of working together, which we have sought to bring out here. In this exhibition, pieces by Mehretu’s friends Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin enter into a rich dialogue with her own art.

The exhibition is realised in cooperation with K21–Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf) that will present it in 2025.

The exhibition will also be enriched by a public programme including a conversation with Julie Mehretu and the artists of the show on March 20, the Italian premiere of the performance Archive of Desire at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi on March 21 and two concerts co-produced with Bourse de Commerce on April 18 and 19, featuring Maya Dunietz and Devonté Hynes in the Atrium of Palazzo Grassi.

Pierre Huyghe: Liminal
Curated by Anne Stenne

Liminal, an exhibition created by Pierre Huyghe in close collaboration with curator Anne Stenne, presents major new creations alongside works from the last ten years, particularly from the Pinault Collection.

Pierre Huyghe has since long questioned the relation between the human and the non-human, and conceives his works as speculative fictions from which emerge other modalities of world. Fictions, to him, are “vehicles for accessing the possible or the impossible—what could be or could not be.”

Pierre Huyghe transforms Punta della Dogana into a dynamic, sensitive milieu perpetually evolving. The exhibition is a transitory state inhabited by human and non-human creatures and becomes the site of formation of subjectivities that are constantly learning, changing, and hybridizing. Their memories are expanding with information captured from events, both perceptible and imperceptible, that permeate the exhibition.

For Pierre Huyghe, the exhibition is an unpredictable ritual, where new possibilities are generated and coexist, without hierarchy or determinism. With Liminal, he invites us to follow other realities, to become strangers to ourselves, from a perspective other than human—inhuman.

A programme of events around the show includes a conversation with Flora Katz at the Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi on May 22, a screening of Pierre Huyghe's film The Host and the Cloud, (2009-2010) on May 23, and a conversation with the artist in the autumn.

This exhibition is supported by Bottega Veneta. Outfits for the work Idiom are designed by Bottega Veneta Creative Director, Matthieu Blazy, in collaboration with the artist.

Liminal has been produced in partnership with the Leeum Museum in Seoul, which will present it in February 2025.