The Anish Kapoor Foundation has started renovating the 18th-century Palazzo Manfrin into a gallery, artist studio, and archival deposit. The project will be led by Mario Codognato, Venice native and current director of the Anish Kapoor Foundation.
The Palazzo Manfrin will host rotating exhibitions in a ground-floor gallery. Its second and third floors will display works from the foundation’s collection, and there will also be room for an archive and a workshop intended to support artists and scholars working in the fields of history, technology, and art.
Palazzo Manfrin was built in the 1500s for the aristocratic Priuli family. The Venetian palazzo was reconstructed during the 1720s, and was further modified in the late 1780s.
Until recent years, the building served as a school and has since fallen into disrepair. Kapoor tapped the architecture firms FWR Associati and UNA studio, based in Venice and Hamburg, respectively, to spearhead this major project.
Kapoor’s foundation is expected to open at the Palazzo Manfrin in 2023. But it is not the only forthcoming Kapoor project headed to the city, however. In 2022, the Gallerie dell’Accademia will host a major exhibition of Kapoor’s sculptures coated in Vantablack, which is believed to be the darkest shade of black in the world.
