Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro celebrates British artist Jenny Saville’s first major exhibition in Venice, and features a newly commissioned essay by the exhibition’s curator, Elisabetta Barisoni, as well as an interview between the artist and Stefania Ventra.

Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro accompanies the first major exhibition in Venice dedicated to one of the foremost painters of our time. This exhibition, which opens in March 2026 to coincide with the Biennale di Venezia, brings together more than thirty works spanning the full arc of Saville’s extraordinary career, marking one of the most extensive presentations of her art ever held in Italy.

Saville’s practice is deeply rooted in the history of painting: while strikingly contemporary, hers is a practice in constant dialogue with the Old Masters and, in particular, with the Venetian tradition. At Ca’ Pesaro, her monumental canvases will converse with the great painters of the city’s past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary expression and Venice’s timeless artistic heritage. In this way, the exhibition is not only a celebration of Saville’s achievements, but also a tribute to Venice itself, a city that the artist has been drawing inspiration from since her student years.

To celebrate this landmark exhibition, the catalogue Jenny Saville a Ca’ Pesaro will feature a newly commissioned essay by the exhibition’s curator, Elisabetta Barisoni, and an interview between Saville and Professor Stefania Ventra, as well as forewords by key city officials. Produced by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, the book will include full illustrations of all of the works included in the show, as well as art historical reference images and installation shots of the exhibition in situ at this iconic Venetian institution

About The Author

Jenny Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge, England, and lives and works in Oxford, England. Collections include Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and The Broad, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2005); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida (2011, traveled to Modern Art Oxford, England, through 2012); Egon Schiele – Jenny Saville, Kunsthaus Zürich (2014–15); Jenny Saville Drawing, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, England (2015–16); NOW, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2018); George Economou Collection, Athens (2018–19); and Museo Novecento, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Museo degli Innocenti, and Museo di Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy (2021–22). Elisabetta Barisoni is Head of Ca’ Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna. Former curator of temporary exhibitions at the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy, she has also been a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, Italy and in 2015 completed her PhD on Margherita Sarfatti at the Università di Verona, Italy. Stefania Ventra is Associate Professor of Museology, Art criticism, and Restoration in the Department of Humanities of the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. Between 2018 and 2021, Ventra was a post-doctoral researcher at the Archivio del Moderno of the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Mendrisio, working on the interdisciplinary project “Milan and Ticino (1796–1848): Shaping the Spatiality of a European capital”. Between 2017 and 2018 she was research fellow at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and adjunct professor of Museology at Sapienza Università di Roma.