VENICE 56TH BIENNALE

Venice, May 6 - The 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice - the Venice Biennale - opens its doors to the public from Saturday through November 22 with the theme All the World's Futures. World-class artists and 89 countries are set to participate in the edition curated by acclaimed Nigerian art critic Okwui Enwezor and chaired by Paolo Baratta. "The world before us today exhibits deep divisions and wounds, pronounced inequalities and uncertainties as to the future," said Baratta. "Despite the great progress made in knowledge and technology, we are currently negotiating an 'age of anxiety'," Baratta added. "Our aim is to investigate how the tensions of the outside world act on the sensitivities and the vital and expressive energies of artists, on their desires and their inner song,". 

Eighty-nine of the 136 artists to show have never before exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and will pose questions, doubts and responses through a multidisciplinary chorus of performances, installations, paintings, drawings, videos, sculptures, and graphic art. Five countries will be participating for the first time: Grenada, Mauritius, Mongolia, Mozambique, and Seychelles. The international art exhibition will open to the public at Venice's Giardini della Biennale and the Arsenale. 

Meanwhile, the city is also celebrating the life work of the late American painter and sculptor Cy Twombly (1928-2011) in a major retrospective in Ca' Pesaro. The show, called Paradise, spans 60 years of Twombly's production and hangs from the halls of the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna and in the Spazio Dom Perignon. The exhibit explores the recurring themes of Twombly's creative research behind his scribble-like compositions and graffiti-likes, including such themes as sexual exuberance. It also explores a vision of a pastoral harmony with nature and one in which body and mind are harmoniously unified, at times through the use of words, phrases and poems. Twombly experimented with composing in the dark, painting with his left hand, and increasing the extension of the brush by fixing it on long sticks - strategies that obscured his artistic training and control of technical means, critics have said.