Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s New Art Island Made a Sunny Splash in a Rainy Venice Vernissage Week

The international art world visiting Venice for the preview week of the Biennale woke up Thursday with great relief to a sunny forecast after two days of rain. For some, the day got even better with a visit to the island of San Giacomo, in the Northern Lagoon, where ARTnews Top 200 collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo today inaugurated a new art site on the island of San Giacomo that will serve as a home for exhibitions, performances, and residencies. 

San Giacomo is the newest exhibition venue for the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, created in 1995 by Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; the foundation opened its headquarters in Turin, Italy, in 2002, and opened the Palazzo Re Rebaudengo and its Art Park among the hills of the Langhe and Roero in Guarene. It also organizes itinerant exhibitions in Spain. 

Rebaudengo bought San Giacomo island from a private banking company in 2018. “In this strip of land surrounded by water,” says Re Rebaudengo in press materials, “I immediately recognized a special place, suited to hosting exhibitions, artworks, and residencies—perfect for accommodating the slower pace of artistic research and fostering dialogue and encounters among artists, theorists, and scholars from all disciplines.”

In collaboration with her husband, Agostino Re Rebaudengo, president of Asja Energy, the island was developed as a circular ecosystem. The site is about a 20-minute boat ride from the Giardini, where Koyo Kouoh’s Biennale exhibition opens to the public on Saturday. It was first put to use for a performance by Brazilian interdisciplinary artist Jota Mombaça in 2022 and two years later for another by Korean dancer Eun Me Ahn.

The site officially inaugurated on Thursday, and will open gradually, initially accessible only during exhibition openings coinciding with future editions of the Biennale, and during guided tours organized by reservation; Venice has provided an on-request stop on the ACTV Line 12 on the Murano-Burano route. 

The island itself has a rich history, starting a millennium ago with a monastery and a resting place for pilgrims. Later it was a home for Cistercian nuns, a quarantine site, and then a home for Franciscan friars. Under Napoleon, the monastery was demolished and the island was adapted to a military outpost, with powder magazines, weapons depots, and defensive structures rising on the land. It was abandoned in 1961 and nature took its course, with brambles spreading and structures collapsing. 

Two Napoleonic-era powder magazines are transformed into exhibition spaces, one hosting the group exhibition “Don’t have hope, be hope!,” featuring works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection. 

The other is home to “Fanfare/Lament,” a solo exhibition by Matt Copson, curated by Swiss supercurator Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at London’s Serpentine Galleries. Atop the building are a series of sculptures made from handcrafted kites produced specially for the show. The first takes the shape of a group of disembodied eyes looking out on the Lagoon, the other a strange, towering black body. A group of seven musicians, meanwhile, play a score by British composer Oliver Leith, a fanfare welcoming visitors to the island. In the darkened space of the former powder magazine is a set of high-tech works that Copson likens to modern cave painting. Laser animations in blue “draw” on walls that are coated with phosphorescent paint that absorbs light and re-emits it with a delay, faintly glowing in green and reflecting the lasers’ drawings.

The grounds are host to permanent installations by Claire Fontaine, Mario Garcia Torres, Hugh Hayden, Goshka Macuga, Pamela Rosenkranz, and Thomas Schütte. 

For me, Hayden’s is the big draw. A new commission, Huff and a Puff (2026) takes its title from the fable of the three little pigs. It is a full-scale chapel that seats about 10 people, tilted forward at a vertiginous 40-degree angle, as if the wolf were doing his best to blow it down. Its brick exterior echoes the former powder magazines nearby, and it’s topped by a green metal roof and a 30-foot-high bell tower. Inside, a crucifix sports a spooky ribcage. 

Rosenkranz’s Old Tree (Pink Seas), 2026, may be the first thing many visitors see on the island, for which it was conceived: a bright pink, 15-foot-high sculpture of a tree whose branches and roots resemble branching blood vessels or neural pathways. 

Nearby is another dramatic piece, Goshka Macuga’s GONOGO (2023), a polished metal rocket standing on a fluorescent blue launch pad. Also commissioned for the island, the work by the Polish-born, London-based artist had its public debut in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, as part of the exhibition “Reaching for the Stars,” of work from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection, but it was first conceived for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London, where it was a finalist in 2021. “My sculpture,” explains Macuga, “visualizes the dilemmas we are facing: it embodies fantasy and reality, aspiration and failure.” At a moment of the hopeful Artemis II mission as well as the world’s wealthiest people seeking to colonize Mars after helping to ruin Earth, the piece is rich with associations, leaving visitors with plenty to think about as they launch, if not on their rockets then on their water taxis back to Venice proper.