Peggy Guggenheim Collection 2026: from Guggenheim Jeune to Fucina degli Angeli

In 2026, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice dedicates its exhibition programme to two pivotal chapters in the cultural history and collecting practices of the twentieth century: the London gallery Guggenheim Jeune and the visionary experience of the Fucina degli Angeli.

AnnieVasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Curva dominante (Dominant Curve) Aprile 1936, Olio su tela 129.2 x 194.3 cm, Museo Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, New York, Fondazione Solomon, R. Guggenheim, New York

Two distinct yet deeply interconnected projects that highlight Peggy Guggenheim’s role as a catalyst for relationships, ideas and experimentation, always in dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection.

Opening the season, from 25 April to 19 October 2026, is Peggy Guggenheim in London. The Making of a Collector, the most extensive museum exhibition ever devoted to the brief but decisive adventure of the Guggenheim Jeune gallery. Curated by Gražina Subelytė and Simon Grant, the exhibition focuses on Peggy Guggenheim’s London years between 1938 and 1939, a formative period in which she shaped her vision and method as a collector, forging connections with key figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Mary Reynolds and Samuel Beckett.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943), Equilibrio (Equilibre) 1932, Olio su tela 41.7 x 33.5 cm Stiftung Arp e. V., Berlino/Rolandswerth

In little more than a year of activity, Guggenheim Jeune became a major reference point for the European avant-garde, hosting over twenty pioneering exhibitions: from Vasily Kandinsky’s first solo show in London to a monographic exhibition on Jean Cocteau, from the first UK group exhibition dedicated to collage to a controversial presentation of contemporary sculpture. The Venetian exhibition brings together around one hundred works from major international museums and private collections, alongside archival materials that convey the atmosphere of intense cultural experimentation on the eve of the Second World War. After Venice, the exhibition will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and subsequently to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, underlining its international scope.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Bacco 2 (Rosso), 1954-60, Vetro soffiato pagliesco con applicazioni a caldo di vetro rosso e acquamare 37,5 x 30 x 20 cm (wooden base 15 x diam. 17,5 cm), Kunstmuseum Walter, Augusta, © Succession Picasso, by SIAE 2026

In autumn, from 14 November 2026 to 29 March 2027, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection will present Fucina degli Angeli. Peggy Guggenheim and Twentieth-Century Artistic Glass, curated by Cristina Beltrami. The exhibition sheds light on one of the most fascinating chapters of post-war Murano glassmaking: the Fucina degli Angeli, founded in the 1950s by Egidio Costantini as a collaborative workshop between master glassmakers and international artists. More than one hundred glass works, together with drawings and historical documents, recount a season of experimentation that involved figures such as Picasso, Calder, Braque, Léger, Fontana and numerous Japanese artists.

Peggy Guggenheim played a decisive role in supporting and promoting this venture, fostering its international reach and facilitating dialogue with the American context. The exhibition places the glass works in conversation with paintings and sculptures by the artists involved, revealing the complexity of a project that redefined the boundaries between art and craftsmanship.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Dorsoduro 701, 30123 Venezia

25 aprile 2026 - 19 ottobre 2026

UNIQUE Returns to Milan: New Visions of Abstraction with Annie Shead and William Van Hoorn

UNIQUE returns to Milan, the exhibition project conceived and curated by Bruno Gnocchi to give visibility to new generations of artists through short-term experimental interventions.

Annie Shead, Front garden, 80x80, 2025

Following its first edition in 2025, UNIQUE renews its collaboration with the historic gallery Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura, which from 24 to 26 January 2026 will host the works of two young British artists: Annie Shead and William Van Hoorn. The opening is scheduled for Friday 23 January at 6:00 pm, at Corso Garibaldi 125 in Milan.

UNIQUE was conceived as a concise format designed to enhance the intensity of the encounter between artwork and viewer, proposing an alternative mode of engagement compared to the extended timelines of traditional exhibitions. The project focuses on a small selection of works, encouraging close observation and a direct relationship with the artists’ creative processes. In this sense, the gallery becomes an almost laboratory-like space, where research unfolds before the viewer’s eyes.

For this second chapter, Bruno Gnocchi brings together two artistic practices that, while rooted in different languages, share a deep reflection on abstraction and on the relationship between matter, gesture and image. William Van Hoorn, born in London in 2000, develops a painterly practice that weaves together concrete abstraction from the second half of the twentieth century with organic and symbolic references drawn from diverse cultural contexts. His canvases are crossed by living forms that disrupt geometric structures and minimalist grids, generating an unstable balance between order and impulse, control and chromatic memory.

William Van Hoorn, No title- Oil on Hessian Jute, 140 x 120

Annie Shead, born in London in 2002, works with what she defines as machine paintings: works that originate from the rituality of textile labour. Visible stitches, thread tension, errors and repetitions transform domestic objects and surfaces into essential compositions, where fabric becomes skin and the artisanal gesture acquires a sculptural dimension. Colour and rhythm replace the brushstroke, giving rise to images in which material itself carries meaning.

The dialogue between Shead and Van Hoorn unfolds in the subtle space between structure and unpredictability. In Van Hoorn’s works, organic forms undermine geometric order; in Shead’s, matter itself destabilises modular systems. Both artists, however, explore abstraction as a tool to create open images capable of conveying the tensions and complexities of the present.

Galleria Antonia Jannone Disegni di Architettura

Corso Garibaldi 125, Milano

24 - 26 gennaio 2026

STORIELLETTE. Gianni D’Urso and Giuseppe De Mattia at VOGA Art Project

From 28 December 2025 to 22 February 2026, VOGA Art Project presents STORIELLETTE, a two-person exhibition by Gianni D’Urso and Giuseppe De Mattia, the third and final chapter of the 2025 exhibition cycle devoted to dialogue between two artists.

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Curated by VOGA Art Project, the exhibition opens on Saturday, 27 December at 7:00 pm in the spaces at via Francesco Curzio dei Mille 58, Bari, and unfolds as a fragmented yet incisive reflection on the present.

The title explicitly refers to Sturiellet by Andrea Pazienza, the iconic collection of short everyday stories, autobiographical flashes and ironic observations of reality. In a similar vein, STORIELLETTE constructs a mosaic of minimal, discontinuous narratives, bringing together Giuseppe De Mattia’s Cronache vere and Gianni D’Urso’s I ragazzi stanno bene series. The result is a sequence of episodes that speak of social disillusionment, existential precarity, failed escapes and small defeats, observed with a lucid, never complacent gaze.

Giuseppe De Mattia presents a layered imaginary that intertwines personal memory, popular traditions and a sharp critique of the art system. Through photography, drawing and audiovisual media, the artist builds ironic and incisive narrative devices capable of exposing the economic, political and exhibition dynamics that shape the cultural world. His practice moves along the boundary between folk art and conceptual approaches, maintaining a strong connection to collective experience and everyday life.

Figlio di gazza, 2023, Matèria Roma Photo_Roberto Apa

Gianni D’Urso responds with works that emerge from collected materials, pre-existing images and manipulated objects, creating visual short circuits where play, dream and disillusion coexist. His research investigates the fragility of the human condition, staging an unstable and precarious reality marked by semantic and poetic shifts. Precarity, failure and irony thus become tools for observing the present without rhetoric, yet with a subtle critical tension.

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Paintings, drawings and sculptures are presented alongside a site-specific sound installation created collaboratively by the two artists, forming an archive of notes, voices and sensations. STORIELLETTE unfolds as an open-ended narrative that oscillates between melancholy and irony, offering an acute and resilient взгляд at the cracks of our time.

VOGA Art Project

Via Francesco Curzio dei Mille 58, 70123, Bari

28 dicembre - 22 febbraio 2026