The International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice has announced that it will host a major exhibition of work by Jenny Saville next year. The solo show will be the British painter’s first in the northern Italian city and will coincide with the 2026 Venice Biennale. Mega-gallery Gagosian, which represents Saville, is supporting the exhibtion.
Ca’ Pesaro is a Baroque marble palace turned art museum facing Venice’s Grand Canal.
There has been sustained market demand for Saville’s work over the last decade at least, and she broke the auction record for a living female artist in 2018 when her 1992 self-portrait Propped sold for £9.5 million at Sotheby’s in London. Other major auction sales include Shift, which sold for $9.5 million in 2016, and the $7.34 million paid for Juncture (1994) this year.
Over the last 12 months, Saville has received considerable institutional recognition, with major museum shows at London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Albertina in Vienna, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
“Venice represents a place where art is an intrinsic part of everyday life and where the Biennale artists of today sit in dialogue with these great Venetian artworks,” Saville said in a statement. “It’s a great honour to have the opportunity to exhibit in Venice.”
The exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro will be curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and will run from March 28 to November 22, 2026. It will comprise 30 or so paintings and “aim to document the development of Saville’s work by tracing her career from her beginnings in the 1990s to the present day,” the museum said in a statement.
“Saville’s practice is deeply rooted in the history of painting, and at Ca’ Pesaro her monumental canvases will engage in dialogue with the great painters of the past present in Venice, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage,” the museum added. “Saville’s relationship with the masters of the past, particularly the Italians, centers on the strong connection she continues to maintain with the Venetian School of painting.”
Ca’ Pesaro’s permanent collection holds a number of works by 20th-century abstract artists who have impacted Saville’s practice, including Cy Twombly.
“This exhibition marks Jenny Saville’s return to Venice, a city she loves, has visited many times, and is rich in the work of the old Venetian masters that she has studied for many years,” Barisoni said in a statement.
The final room of the exhibition will display a previously unseen series of works that Saville has created “in homage to the lagoon city.”
“I think for all contemporary painters who look at Old Masters, the Old Masters are contemporary to them,” Saville told the Art Newspaper earlier this year. “You only have to go and see the Titian room at the National Gallery, it’s just sensational. They come alive in every era, and they mean something different to each era of painters that are around at that time. So they’re always relevant, they’re just part of the dialogue you have with other people in painting.”
