Exhibitions

Sanya Kantarovsky. Basic Failure

Venice, Italy

Dark humour, fragile bodies, strange faces, and a Venetian palazzo that makes everything feel slightly haunted.

Sanya Kantarovsky Boy With Cigarette, (2026)

Image credit

Sanya Kantarovsky Boy With Cigarette, (2026) Courtesy of the artist, VeneKlasen, Modern Art and Gisela Capitain. Photo: Pierre Lehors

Meet the artist

Sanya Kantarovsky

The Movement

Ceramic, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Sculpture, Painting

ArtLovers Tip

A must-see Venice 2026 stop if you like painting with psychological depth — beautiful, uncomfortable, darkly funny, and quietly unforgettable.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Kantarovsky’s exhibition brings together paintings, ceramic works, and a sculpture made in collaboration with a Murano glass studio, creating a direct dialogue with the architecture and atmosphere of Palazzo Loredan.

His world is figurative, psychological, and uneasy. The human body appears vulnerable, awkward, almost theatrical: figures seem caught in moments of shame, desire, collapse, transformation, or private revelation. There is humour, but it is never comfortable. It feels closer to a nervous laugh than a joke.

The official Istituto Veneto page describes the works as focused on the human figure and on themes such as spirituality, alienation, and vulnerability.

Worth the trip

Because Basic Failure feels made for Venice in 2026: intimate, strange, and emotionally charged.

In a city full of spectacle during the Biennale, Kantarovsky offers something more psychological. His paintings don’t shout. They disturb slowly. They bring together art history, absurdity, anxiety, myth, and the small humiliations of being human.

Palazzo Loredan matters too. The historic setting — books, stone, rooms full of memory — gives the works an extra layer of tension. These are contemporary figures, but they feel as if they are being watched by centuries.

How to experience it

Look at the faces first. Then the hands.

Kantarovsky’s figures often seem caught between exposure and concealment, as if they want to be seen and disappear at the same time. Don’t try to “solve” the scenes too fast. Let them stay ambiguous.

This is a good exhibition to visit when you need a break from the Biennale’s big statements. It is smaller, stranger, and maybe more memorable because of that.

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