This autumn, I had the chance to visit the 56th Art Biennale in Venice. As a designer and art lover, this is the type of event that blows my mind and feed my inspiration for developing new ideas for carpets.
Every two years, the Art Biennale shows a big variety of artists and researchers from all around the world. The Venice Biennale is one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions showing, for the first time, works specifically created for the six-months–long event. It gives a global and prospective overview of what artists and creators are working on, in term of concepts, ideas, materials, technologies, colours… Pantone regularly shows some of these art works in their Pantone View colour planner books. As a regular user of these Pantone trend books, we noticed, in the latest one -Winter 2017-18- received last week in our burmatex® offices, some pictures of the gorgeous installation from Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota – The key in the hand.
The year without showing the Art Biennale (odd year number), the same concept applies for the Venice Architecture Biennale which I had been also lucky to visit in 2014! 2016 will be the year for it, and I have already decided to visit it!
Chiharu Shiota – The key in the hand – Japanese pavilion
Herman de Vries – From Earth: everywhere – Dutch pavilions
Venice Architecture Biennale 2014- Details from the Egyptian pavilion
Venice Architecture Biennale 2014- Details from the Italian pavilion
A little bit more…
The two main venues in Venice are Giardini and Arsenale. Giardini has the historical Central Pavilion dated back to 1894, and 29 national pavilions built between 1907 (Belgium) and 2015 (Australia), and designed by architects such as Aalto, Hoffmann, Rietveld, Scarpa, Stirling…. The Arsenale is the largest pre-industrial production centre of the world, including a 50,000 sqm site restored in 1999.