Nancy Genn's Venice Exhibition Explores Void and Materiality

A solo exhibition of Nancy Genn, a California-born artist (San Francisco, 1931), is on view at Marignana Arte in Venice. The show highlights her multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, painting, and papermaking, with a focus on her Japanese-influenced works. Genn, who began experimenting with lost-wax casting in the 1960s and direct casting later, started making her own paper in the 1970s after learning techniques in Japan. The exhibition features pieces from her Saratoga and Marshfield series, where handmade paper is combined with chalcography, gouache, casein, monotype, collage, and tearing to create sculptural depth. Works like 'Sedona 11' evoke Japanese architecture's horizontal space and essentiality, while 'Patagonia 7' (2014, casein on canvas) and the diptych from the Patagonia series, along with 'Rainbars_15' and 'The Shape of Water,' explore water as a motif reflecting Genn's San Francisco Bay origins and her affinity with Venice's lagoon atmosphere. The artist's approach emphasizes emptiness (vuoto) as a generative force, echoing sumie ink painting's interplay of void and fullness. Genn's career, described as a continuous renewal, treats art as an attitude toward life rather than a job. The exhibition runs at Marignana Arte in Venice.