A couple of weeks ago, I had gone for a walk in Cannaregio area of Venice to visit some of the collateral art exhibitions of Venice Art Biennale. That included a visit to the art exhibition in the European Cultural Centre (ECC) in Palazzo Mora.
This is the third part of my visit-diary to art events in Cannaregio area of Venice. You can also check the first and second parts of this diary at the links below:
Venice Biennale: Art in Cannaregio Part 01
Venice Biennale: Art in Cannaregio Part 02
Art Exhibition at ECC - Palazzo Mora, Venice
Since 2011, during Venice Art Biennale, ECC organises an art exhibition titled "Personal Structures". This year (2026) the theme of this exhibition is "Confluences". There are three venues of this exhibition - Palazzo Mora, Palazzo Bembo and Marinaressa gardens. It includes a mix of installations, paintings, sculptures and performances. Entrance to the exhibition is free and it is on till 22 November 2026.
This post looks only at the artworks presented in Palazzo Mora, which is located in Cannaregio area of Venice. I am hoping to go to visit the exhibition at Palazzo Bembo very soon.
This year's theme Confluences is inspired by meeting of rivers, looking at coming together of ideas, backgrounds and ways of thinking. It explores how personal experiences connect with shared realities.
Click on the images for a bigger view of the artworks.
My 15 Favourite Artworks at Palazzo Mora
Let me now present my favourite artworks. It was not easy to choose only fifteen among the hundreds of artworks presented this year and these represent my subjective preferences, which tend towards kitsch and colourful works.
These are not presented in any particular order. In fact, at the end, I have written about which of these 15, I liked most!
1. Sculptures by Judith Unger, US
Judith has some female sculptures in ceramics with some gold work and design on the theme of rape, mostly in bright yellows. I have taken some of them in the image below.
I had seen similar works by Judith earlier, though they had softer hues. Her sculptures are often about women and their fight for dignity, about fighting injustice and healing from trauma.
Somehow, in my mind the bright and sunny yellow colour, does not match with the sadness and pain of rape. Therefore, even if the faces of the women in these sculptures are sad, the sculptures themselves seem to express hope and resilience.
2. Paintings by G-Sim Seyeon, S. Korea
Seyeon has some mixed-media artworks on canvas, titled "We shared a moment". They are hypnotising, looking like erupting fireworks or some cosmic explosion.
G-Sim or Seyeon Kim as he is known as, is a south Korean artist based in Osaka Japan. He describes his work as focusing "on capturing microscopic "moments"—vanishing instants that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye".
Many of his early works explored exploding fireworks, while recent series depict crashing ocean waves and coastal waters. Thus, this year in the Venice Biennale, he seems to have gone back to his fireworks inspired art.
Each of his canvas is big and I could have stood there and looked at it for a long time. Unfortunately, the image can give you only a glimpse of that feeling.
3. Painting by Kaoru Shibuta, Japan
It is an acrylic on canvas artwork titled "Ochatsumi days". The artist says that he has picked up the invisible and harmonious sounds of Ochatsumi (tea-picking) in a tea garden - the rustle of the leaves, the wind, atmosphere of the fields - into a visual composition.
Thus, this artwork can be imagined as the musical notes of sounds in the visual language of the artist. Perhaps this means that he has synesthesia, which is a neurological condition in which senses have cross-connections, so that sounds can be perceived as colours.
Shibuta was born in Hokkaido, and is now based in Kagawa, Japan. He synthetically transforms music and natural sounds into paintings, like this work.
In terms of simplicity and a child-like sense of beauty, his artworks remind me of Mirò.
4. Woven and Printed Fabric Painting by Desmond Beach, US
The artwork has two young black women standing close, leaning and supporting each other, against a colourful background with a layered surface of fabrics, which are expressing ancestral archives. It is titled "The Quiet Between Us".
The artwork includes a digital painting on jacquard woven fabrics, which have been stitched together by hand and by machine. I appreciated that the fabric was woven with Jacquard, a weaving shuttle first developed and used in Schio in the late 1800s, whose name is celebrated in our Jacquard gardens.
Desmond is an interdisciplinary artist, professor and researcher with a PhD in art and media.
5. The Mixed Media Sculpture by Martha Russo, US
This artwork has mainly ceramics, but it also includes paper-clay, glaze, wood, metal, polyurethane foam and paper, to create a mass of writhing snake-like tentacles forming a rough cube. It is described as "the ancient earth-bound substance embracing the precarious - extending into space, flirting with gravity and pulsing with fiction".
This artwork is titled "Nomos - Venetian Cube".
Martha's biography is very inspiring. A world-class athlete and a hockey player, she suffered a career-ending injury in 1984. An year later, in 1985 she did her BA in developmental biology and psychology. However, the injury changed the way she looked at herself and her role in the world. She began studying fine arts in Florence, Italy and did a master in fine arts in USA. She is involved with Artnauts, a socially and politically aware art collective and teaches at the in the Art and Art History Department of University of Colorado Boulder and at the College of Engineering and Applied Science
6. Paintings by Demi Padua, Philippines
This artwork includes some acrylic paintings on canvas. Its figures remind me of the steampunk costumes.
Demi is a painter, multimedia artist and a graphic designer. Born in Calapan, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines, he was interested in becoming an artist from his childhood. His paintings bring together his experiences in theatrical production and design with visual arts.
He says that he uses layers of printed material as a collage over his paintings and shows peeling away of those additional layers to unmask his real identity, without fear of perception.
That sounds like conflicting ideas about about his gender and sexual identity, but I am not sure if he means it in that way. However, this understanding adds a sense of sadness and wistfulness to his figures.
7. Paintings by José Moñú, Spain
José Moñú is an artist from Zaragosa (Spain). His artworks are acrylic paintings on canvas in bright colours. Entering in this room, felt like entering a room with deforming mirrors, where can laugh at our faces and bodies.
He is known for his large-format, boldly coloured acrylic works featuring people with deformed, dynamic, blurred, or melted heads, which has been described as abstract expressionism.
8. Artworks by Vasily Klyukin, France
His subjects are not immediately clear. For example, in the image on the left, you can see the woman with the baby, a familiar figure of Madonna with baby Jesus.
He explains his approach to art as "Demetricizm" - an art revealing the force-lines from which form is born. Originally from Russia, Vasily is based in Southern France and Monaco, he is a visual artist, sculptor and architect.
Vasily is also known for a digital design project called “Designing Legends,” which has been published as a book of imaginary architecture.
9. Ceramic Art by Lara Bohinc, Great Britain
Lara is a Slovenian-born artist, based in London UK, who creates functional ceramics in a variety of materials including stone, metal, glass and wood.
Her three artworks shown here are titled seabed vase, marine vase and trap vessel. There have been created as part of the theme work called "Shared Streams", with materials that seem to suggest a state of flux and flow.
She runs the Bohinc Studio in London, which works at the intersection of furniture, functional sculpture, and material research.
10. Installation by Donna Isham, USA
This installation paired together a diptych of paintings with a ceramic sculpture. The two paintings are - "She never left" defined as a fractured portrait and "I found it at the curio shop", while the sculpture is titled "Soleil", exploring the fluid boundary between figuration and abstraction.
I could see the connection between the woman in the sculpture (it can be seen at the top of this post) and the painting on the left, but was not sure of how the two linked with the second painting. However, it was the one artwork that seemed to express the idea of "confluence", the theme of this exhibition.
On her website, Donna has written, "I am an expressionist artist driven by a desire to uncover and communicate the hidden human spirit. Working across painting, sculpture, and immersive paintings ... works are created in collaboration with my husband, musician Mark Isham, extending the emotional and psychological dimensions of my visual practice through sound and animation."
11. Artwork by Fintan Whelan, Ireland/Germany
The giant abstract artwork with mixed media on canvas has beautiful swirling colours. He is the only artist in the exhibition, for which no country was mentioned. I checked and found that he is of Irish origin and now lives in Germany, but has exhibitions all around the world, so probably feels like a citizen of the world. Appropriately, this work is titled "Earth's Abundance".
12. An Art-Science Collaboration by Shizuku Takahashi & Geraldine Ondrizek
This beautiful work brings together a science author from Japan and an art professor from Oregon, USA. They both look at the journey of a single human cell as it develops.
Shizuko Takahashi has written a book titled, "Becoming you: A Journey From a Single Cell" and Geraldine Ondrizek has made a seres of 12 paintings to illustrate part of that journey.
The image below presents the steps from 2 to 5 of that journey and are titled 2. A world in a grain of sand; 3. The intricate you; 4. One cell; and, 5. Passing down.
Dr Takahashi is a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics. Her interest is in exploring the ethical boundaries and clinical practices of technologies like oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) and prenatal screening. At the same time, she is also an accomplished children's book author and illustrator.
13. Marble Sculpture by Pablo Damian Cristi, Italy-Argentina
I loved the way he has used marble to represent the clothe covering the figure, covering her face like a translucent veil, torn in places like her knees.
Using a solid surface like marble to represent a soft fabric, has a long history in art, but still every time, I see something like this, it makes me pause.
Pablo has written on his instagram page that he likes using historical sculpting techniques to push the boundaries of contemporary sculpture. He is engaged in creating a monumental sculpture of Christ carrying the cross, inspired by the two sculptures of Michaelangelo on this theme.
14. Artworks of the Orleans Gallery, USA
I loved the Jazzy vibes of these artworks from the New Orleans gallery which include works of different artists.
The artists include the following - Andrew LaMar Hopkins, Karen Ocker, Michie Cooper, Adam Trest, Joe Mustachia, Tony Bernard, Jen Morgan, Kloe Donley and Morgan Gray. Each of these artists have so much work on their Instagram pages, to which I have given links and you can spend hours looking at each of them.
15. Sculpture by Tim David Trillsam, Germany
Tim expresses the fragility and resilience of the human form in his sculptures, that have elongated forms similar to those developed under the Mannerism movement.
His own typical touch is added in the oversized hands and feet of his sculptures.
Take a look at his website and his Instagram page, he has some very interesting artwork there. He describes his artistic journey as "he seamlessly weaves classical sculpture education with a distinctive creative identity honed at prestigious art academies".
In The End
I hope that you have enjoyed looking at the 15 of my favourite artworks from the European Cultural centre's art exhibition for the Venice Art Biennale 2026. If you are in Venice before 22 November 2026, find time to visit it - it is free and has a lot of beautiful art to inspire and give joy to you.
Let me conclude this journey with a Chinese artist, whom I did not include in the above fifteen but I had liked - Zhu Na. Zhu Na is a contemporary artist, actress, and pop singer from Mainland China, and her artwork is titled "My grandmother's Qipao".
Qipao is supposed to be a traditional Chinese dress, but the green dress worn by the girl-sculpture below does not look like one - may be it means that even traditional dresses could look very modern?
If you have to choose one artwork among all those presented above, which one would you choose? I am not able to decide between Fintan Whelan, José Moñú and Kaoru Shibuta.
*****
