BY ALEXXA GOTTHARDT
Each year, the Venice
Biennale’s national pavilions provide a platform for countries around the world
to showcase their most relevant and influential art. This year, as the 51
pavilions scattered across the Giardini and Arsenale opened their doors, we
sought out the highlights you can’t miss—from breakout artist Anne Imhof’s
performative takeover of the German pavilion to Tunisia’s interactive
meditation on global migration.
Phyllida Barlow’s
fantastical sculptures stretch high towards the lofty ceilings of the British
Pavilion. The group of five bulging, grey columns, topped with tilting
rectangular blocks, dwarfs viewers in the central gallery. They also set the
tone for an installation in which Barlow explores the precarious relationship
between the architectural and the theatrical, between real and fake.
Barlow is known for
augmenting and ennobling everyday materials in her large-scale constructions
and she pushes this skill to its apex in the Biennale presentation. Across the
show, huge forms forged from wood, fabric, foam, mesh, and plaster resemble
giant improvised toys and architectural decorations designed for elaborate
stage sets.
But while many of Barlow’s
sculptures might initially read as whimsical, they can also suddenly turn
ominous. Entering one side room, you glimpse an enticingly colorful patchwork
of panels, only to look up and realize that anvil-shaped forms extend from the
panels and loom overhead.
Litter covers gravel
outside of the Palladian-style building that has housed the U.S. pavilion since
1930. This unkempt atmosphere, of course, is intentional, and introduces Mark
Bradford’s bold takeover of the stately space, which he has transformed into a
ruin.
The otherwise resplendently
clean and white walls of the building’s central rotunda are now peeling and
covered in splotches of grey that look like bruises. In another gallery, the
ceiling seems to have given out, a bulbous, scarred mass emerging from it.
Titled Spoiled Foot (2016), it’s one of the Los Angeles-based Bradford’s most
ambitious and arresting works to date. Visitors are invited to walk around and
touch its rough red and black surface, which is covered in indentations
resembling lesions.
Like much of Bradford’s
work, the installation addresses the discrimination and violence against black,
gay, and other marginalized bodies. But in a space that represents the United
States—where prejudice towards minorities is often bolstered by federal
legislation—the political message of his practice is powerfully amplified………
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-venice-biennales-11-best-pavilions
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