Alberto Scodro | La Biennale di Venezia 2026

We are thrilled to announce that gallery artist Alberto Scodro (b. 1984, Marostica, Italy) presents EMERSA SOMMERSA at the Venice Pavilion for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, as part of Persistent Notes, on view at the Giardini from 9 May to 22 November 2026.

Scodro presents twelve sculptures from his UG (Untitled Glass-Sand) series, installed in the pool in front of the Padiglione Venezia. Produced in his kilns in Nove by fusing glass, sand, industrial scraps, and found objects at one thousand degrees, the works resemble efflorescences dredged up from the seabed — evoking coral formations, mineral structures, and the submerged dimension of the city itself: what sustains Venice but remains invisible, surfacing only under special conditions.

Woven among the sculptures, a forest of slender steel extensions of varying heights carries door handles from Olivari's historic collections — by Ignazio Gardella, Gio Ponti, Vincent Van Duysen, Barber & Osgerby, and Antonio Citterio — rising from the water like a reed bed or the briccole that mark the channels of the lagoon. The handles point downward toward imaginary underwater doors, their positions traced in the water by slow columns of rising bubbles, each one opening a threshold of Venice: the Doge's Palace, the Fondaco dei Turchi, Palazzo Fortuny, Ca' Rezzonico, Palazzo Mocenigo.

In EMERSA SOMMERSA, nothing is truly separate: the whole and the broken, resistance and fragility, above and below, nature and culture, matter and imagination. Everything exists together in an improper continuity — which is, of course, the condition Venice has always inhabited.

The exhibition is curated by Giovanna Zabotti, with Denis Isaia and Cesare Biasini Selvaggi. A work by Scodro has been acquired by La Galleria BPER, the corporate collection of BPER Banca, principal sponsor of the pavilion.

Persistent Notes — 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia

Padiglione Venezia, Giardini, Venice

9 May – 22 November 2026

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