The International Gallery of Modern Art at Palazzo Pesaro in Venice has announced that it will host a major exhibition of works by Jenny Saville next year. This solo exhibition will be the British painter’s first in the northern Italian city and will be held concurrently with the 2026 Venice Biennale. Gagosian, the major gallery representing Savile, is “supporting the exhibition”, it said art news.
Ca’ Pesaro is a Baroque marble palace converted into an art museum, facing the Grand Canal of Venice.
Despite continued demand for her work (she broke the auction record for a living female artist in 2018, when her 1992 Self-Portrait Propp Sold for £9.5 million at Sotheby’s in London), institutional recognition remained elusive until this year. But in the past 12 months, Saville, who was born in Cambridge in 1970, has had three major museum exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Albertina Museum in Venice and the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth.
“Venice represents a place where art is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and today’s Biennale artists are in dialogue with these great Venetian artworks,” Saville told us Arts News. “It’s an honor to have the opportunity to exhibit in Venice.”
The exhibition at the Palazzo Pesaro will be curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and will run from March 21 to November 26, 2026. Gagosian said in a statement that the exhibition will include 30 paintings and “aims to document the development of Savile’s oeuvre by tracing his career from the 1990s to the present day.”
“Saville’s practice is deeply rooted in the history of painting, and at Palazzo Pesaro her monumental canvases will enter into dialogue with the great painters of Venice’s past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage,” the gallery added. “Saville’s relationship with the masters of the past, particularly the Italian masters, is centered on the close ties she continues to maintain with the Venetian School.”
Ca’ Pesaro’s permanent collection includes works by many 20th-century abstract artists who influenced Savile’s practice, including Ct Twombly.
The final room of the exhibition will feature a series of never-before-seen works created by Saville as a “homage to the lagoon city”.
“I think for all contemporary painters who look at the Old Masters, the Old Masters are contemporary to them,” Saville told The Art Newspaper earlier this year. “You just go and look at the Titian room at the National Gallery and it’s just amazing. They come alive in every era and mean something different to the painters of every era at that time. So they’re always relevant, they’re just part of the conversation you have with other people in the painting.”
