Pascale Marthine Tayou. 21Art in collaboration with Galleria Continua

From February 13 to April 4, 2026, 21Art presents in Treviso a solo exhibition by Pascale Marthine Tayou (Nkongsamba, Cameroon, 1966), one of the most influential voices in the international contemporary art scene.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, Little Chalk B, 2015, chalk and dried leaves on wood, 87 × 116 × 6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA. Copyright: © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Paul Hennebelle.

The exhibition marks the beginning of a collaboration between 21Art and Galleria Continua, long a point of reference for the artist and his work. It also aligns with the strategy of 21Art — a benefit corporation founded by Alessandro Benetton based on a project by entrepreneur Davide Vanin — which aims to develop national and international partnerships as a means of supporting and promoting contemporary artistic research.

The exhibition traces a journey through memory, identity, and geopolitics, mapping the shifting relationship between humanity and otherness that lies at the core of Pascale Marthine Tayou’s practice.

Active since the early 1990s and internationally recognized for his participation in Documenta 11 and several editions of the Venice Biennale, Tayou lives and works between Ghent and Yaoundé. His open and multifaceted practice spans sculpture, installation, drawing, video, and textile art, and is grounded in a deliberate refusal of any fixed geographic or cultural belonging. Tayou’s work is rooted in the awareness that identity, power, and tradition are social and symbolic constructs, constantly subject to transformation. The notion of travel — both physical and mental — and the experience of encountering the Other are central to his artistic research, which critically engages with the dynamics of the “global village.”

At the beginning of his career, Tayou added an “e” to both his first and middle names, giving them a feminine ending as a playful gesture intended to distance himself from patriarchal artistic authority and rigid gender roles. This resistance also extends to any attempt to confine his practice to a specific cultural or geographic origin — a position clearly reflected in the diversity and strength of the works presented at 21Art Treviso.

The exhibition brings together a significant selection of emblematic works spanning a wide range of media.

Tug of War stages a symbolic confrontation between two bronze figures, ironically subverting traditional power dynamics and prompting reflection on gender relations and geopolitical imbalances. With a tone of irony, the title alludes to historical tensions between Western powers and African societies, transforming the duel into a space for reflection on complementarity, power, and the subtle reversal of dominant structures.

The Eseka series originates from a local event — the site of a train derailment in the town of Eseka, about 100 kilometers from Yaoundé — to create a universal metaphor. These works represent spaces that simultaneously welcome and repel, moving within the fragile territory between desire, trauma, and aspiration.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, Poupée Pascale, 2019, crystal and mixed media, 63 × 50 × 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA. Copyright: © ADAGP, Paris.

Completing the exhibition path, Poupées Pascale and Bantu Towels introduce a more intimate and narrative dimension. Through materials such as crystal, stitched textiles, and everyday objects, Tayou constructs hybrid forms that foster dialogue between cultures, memories, and symbols. The act of sewing and assembling places the domestic sphere at the center of the creative process, transforming it into a site of collaboration, transmission, and renewal.

Initiated in 2012, the Charcoal Frescoes are compositions that combine a decorative aesthetic with a critical reading of the contemporary world. Beneath their apparent formal beauty, these charcoal works function as sharp political reflections, addressing themes such as resource extraction, labor relations, and consumption. Alongside these recent Charcoal Frescoes, Tayou also presents a series of new chalk frescoes. Chalk and charcoal are two fundamental materials in Pascale Marthine Tayou’s practice, here brought into dialogue to emphasize the material continuity and coherence of his artistic research. The exhibition includes very recent works from both series, underscoring their ongoing relevance, as well as an unpublished Charcoal Fresco, presented for the first time in Treviso.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition reveals a complex and layered practice in which aesthetic experimentation is inseparable from social and political critique. Tayou’s work becomes a space of encounter and awareness, capable of addressing contemporary tensions while inviting renewed forms of interpretation and dialogue.

Pascale Marthine Tayou

February 13 - April 4, 2026

21Art in collaboration with Galleria Continua

Viale della Repubblica 3, Villorba (TV)

Tycjan Knut. On Formality

From February 12 to March 7 2026, the Milan spaces of Cadogan Gallery host On Formality, a solo exhibition by the Polish artist Tycjan Knut (Warsaw, 1985), who on this occasion presents a new group of works in which he explores form by pushing it beyond the limits of the square and the frame.

Tycjan Knut, On Formality 24, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. Photo credit The Artist. Courtesy of Cadogan Gallery

Moving away from traditional formats, Knut produces his works on custom-made, asymmetrical-shaped canvases, transforming the support itself into an active element that destabilizes the conventional relationship between figure and background, introducing moments of pause, ambiguity, and spatial tension.

The new works exhibited in On Formality speak of painting as a place of negotiation rather than resolution, where limits are tested, form is suspended, and the act of looking expands.

The paintings were realized over the course of several months spent in isolation in the Polish countryside, in a village called Dry Forest, a remote location lacking an internet connection; this deliberate distancing allowed Knut to engage with conceptual themes such as structure, process, and duration. In this context, his painting practice is configured as an exercise in reduction and attention, in which minimal deviations acquire meaning and the tension between control and dissolution remains suspended.

The artist himself states: “in painting, I try to rely completely on intuition, because in its essence it seems to me the purest form. To cultivate this quality in my work, I renounce every form of preparation.” For his works, he draws inspiration from twentieth-century geometric abstract art, in particular from lesser-known masters; his works resonate with this tradition but go beyond its boundaries, free from the constraints of formula and beyond historical trends of reference.

Many of his works are constructed from overlapping, extremely thin and airbrushed lines, developed through a process closer to textile construction than to painterly gesture: here form is not asserted, but accumulated, emerging gradually from repetition and density. Subtle tonal variations and almost imperceptible shifts generate surfaces that appear silent and controlled, while maintaining a latent sense of movement and creating a continuous spatial illusion.

Tycjan Knut. On Formality

February 12 - March 7, 2026

Cadogan Gallery | Via Bramante 5, Milan

Antonio Scaccabarozzi – Diafanés. The exhibition at the Fortuny Museum in Venice

The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia presents, in the spaces of the Fortuny Museum, the exhibition Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, a project curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina, in collaboration with Galleria Clivio and the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive.

Antonio Scaccabarozzi - Diafanés, Museo Fortuny, Venezia. Photo: Irene Fanizza

The exhibition presents an intervention dedicated to one of the most rigorous and singular strands of Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century, placing the work of Antonio Scaccabarozzi (1936–2008) in dialogue with the figure and legacy of Mariano Fortuny. The comparison — guided by structural affinities rather than formal analogies — explores a shared conception of the artwork as a space of passage and experience.

Best known for his pictorial research of the 1970s, in which arithmetic calculation is combined with chromatic and dimensional variables, Scaccabarozzi developed an unprecedented visual language expressed through translucent and transparent membranes — sheets of acetate or polyethylene — capable of generating spaces for exploration. These works investigate the relationships between architecture, observer, and artistic practice, exerting a lasting influence on generations of contemporary artists.

A visionary inventor of techniques that reshaped the relationship between landscape and body, between antiquity and modernity, Mariano Fortuny is recognized for designing extraordinary forms — such as pleating — that radically transformed the very idea of clothing. Both artists can be regarded as refined and attentive weavers of diaphanous works, entrusted to the viewer’s gaze and experience with the implicit invitation to be examined and traversed — to be seen through their layered structures in a contemplation charged with poetry.

Antonio Scaccabarozzi, Untitled (Shaped Polyethylene), 1999, double-cut polyethylene, 76 x 85 cm. Courtesy Galleria Clivio

The title Diafanés refers to the quality of bodies that allow themselves to be traversed by light, offering a cross-cutting interpretive key to the project. The exhibition unfolds through approximately twenty works, including two interventions in direct dialogue with the museum’s permanent collections. The presentation is complemented by a section dedicated to the relationship between Scaccabarozzi’s research and contemporary design, featuring a creation by designer Maria Calderara, as well as an inclusive project for partially sighted and blind visitors, developed by the Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive in collaboration with the Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano. Mediation activities and an interdisciplinary public program accompany the project.

The exhibition assumes an unprecedented role within the Venetian context due to the artist’s historical connection with the city: Scaccabarozzi was represented by Galleria del Cavallino, in dialogue with the intellectual milieu of the postwar period. Today, he is the focus — for the first time — of an exhibition capable of restoring, in Mediation activities and an interdisciplinary public program accompany the projectan organic way, the relationship between his work and Venice. The city’s aquatic and atmospheric qualities find a deep resonance in his works, characterized by diaphanous, light, and shifting stratifications that explore degrees of visibility, perception, and the relationship between individual, environment, and temporality.

Antonio Scaccabarozzi, Merate (Polietilene sagomato), 2000, Polietilene tagliato doppio, 137 x 95 cm. Courtesy Galleria Clivio

LIFE AND WORK

A leading figure in analytical and conceptual painting, Antonio Scaccabarozzi developed over more than forty years a coherent and radical language aimed at examining the foundations of the visual through a phenomenological and mathematical investigation of color within the space of the pictorial event. Following his neo-concrete and programmed-art experiences of the 1960s and the analytical research of the 1970s, the artist reached a mature expressive phase in a practice that is at once conceptual and lyrical, where painting emerges as a continuous negotiation between measure and freedom, design and contingency, calculation and emotion.

Beginning in the 1980s, the series Quantità libere, Polietileni, Banchise, and Ekleipsis marked a decisive turning point in his research. The adoption of polyethylene sheet as a primary medium transformed the pictorial surface into a diaphanous, versatile, and ethereal membrane: no longer a simple support, but an operational field in which painting redefines itself as event, process, and spatial relation. Cut, folded, layered, shaped, or left slack, polyethylene becomes an autonomous work, addressing at a new level the problem of vision and its limits, the recto and verso of painting, and its environmental extension.

As the artist himself stated: “The idea is to place the work in the boundary zone of opposing forces, where the tension established between the configuration of the object and the gaze that moves beyond it charges this idea with vitality.” Within this framework, the exhibited works — suspended or laid out in space — establish an active relationship with the architecture of Palazzo Fortuny and with the visitor’s body, inviting an experience of seeing constructed through passage, displacement, and duration.

With Antonio Scaccabarozzi. Diafanés, the Fortuny Museum reaffirms its role as a site of research and experimentation, offering the public an immersive journey in which historical memory and contemporaneity enter into dialogue, prompting reflection on the limits and possibilities of visual perception.

ANTONIO SCACCABAROZZI. DIAFANÉS

Museo Fortuny, Venice

January 28 – April 6, 2026

Curated by Ilaria Bignotti and Camilla Remondina

In collaboration with Clivio Gallery and Antonio Scaccabarozzi Archive