Joseph Beuys' Early Works on View at Palazzo Cini in Venice

Palazzo Cini in Venice presents a focused exhibition on Joseph Beuys' early period, featuring works from the 1940s onward. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, the show is set in a dimly lit space that avoids spectacularizing the historic rooms, instead using contrast. Drawings, casts, and assemblages are displayed in frames or vitrines, creating an alienating effect. The works exhibit a tension between synthesis and expressiveness, with primal, tribal, and animistic references. Human and animal bodies are drawn, sculpted, doubled, diminished, or enhanced, blending symbolic charge with intellectual reasoning. The exhibition concludes the centenary celebrations of Beuys' birth in an understated yet compelling manner.