Representing Italy at the 2026 Venice Biennale will be Chiara Camoni: she is the artist chosen for the Italian Pavilion, which will be curated by Cecilia Canziani and will feature her in an exhibition entitled Con te, con tutto. Born in Piacenza in 1974, Camoni has established herself as one of the leading figures in the Italian art scene of her generation. She completed her education by graduating in Sculpture from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 1999 and, for several years, collaborated with the Institute for the Diffusion of Natural Sciences in Naples. He currently lives and works in Fabbiano, a town in the hills of Alta Versilia, near Seravezza, among the Apuan Alps.
Camoni’s practice is multifaceted, ranging from drawing to video, from plant prints to sculpture, with a predilection for the use of ceramics, including polychrome and glazed terracotta. A distinctive feature of her work is the integration of objects drawn from the domestic sphere or, prominently, organic materials collected directly from her garden or the countryside. These raw materials, which include herbs, berries, flowers, different types of clay and ashes, are crucial not only as components, but because their properties determine the natural tones that characterize her works, recalling the earth and vegetation that the artist incorporates into her sculptures. For example, the artist uses a mixture of river sand, earth and plant ash for glazing porcelain or stoneware.
The creative process involves manipulating and reassembling the works through gestures that take on a ritual connotation. Such gestures establish a deep connection with archaic and ancestral worlds, focusing on exploring the relationship between craftsmanship and the spiritual dimension. The search for almost primal or ancient forms is an essential and constitutive aspect of his work.
The central themes of her artistic investigation include the passage of time, the creative power of nature and its metamorphoses, rituals and human relationships. This approach inevitably introduces into the work a component of randomness, indeterminacy and ambiguity, which manifests itself as a trace both in the materials chosen and in the process of creating the works.
The artist has a fascination with archaeological collections, such as Etruscan and Egyptian, a fascination that does not aim to construct a specific system of knowledge, but rather to satisfy a desire that can also have ambiguous implications. The artist reflects on the contrast between ancient objects, created with great skill and precious materials to be concealed forever and intended to accompany the deceased in the afterlife (maximum effort for minimum visibility), and the contemporary trend (minimum effort for maximum visibility). Despite now being displayed and illuminated, those objects retain an irresistible, latent “charge” from the hands of the creators and the darkness in which they were meant to remain. The artist questions how the current art world can ignore this “charge” on a daily basis.
Camoni also explores the question of the disappearance of forms. He asks whether disappearance is actually an appearance constituted by absence, or a form that persists in a changed state. This leads to the idea of works in potency, unfinished, eluding detail, or works in decay, where the incessant work of time acts. It is in this uncertainty that lies what emerges and sinks in a continuous cycle. Regarding sculpture, the artist reflects on the nature of the simulacrum, understood as a presence that does not refer to an underlying reality, but claims to be valid as reality itself.
A fundamental element of Camoni’s practice is the collective and exchange dimension. Her works are often made in collaboration with friends and family, or through organized workshops and seminars that give rise to extemporaneous groups. The artist has been a promoter of several collective projects: she founded Magra, Museum of Contemporary Art in Granara, together with other artists, and the Vladivostok group. She also started the Center for Experimentation, a collective presented as a collector of different forms of shared authorship.
Among his most important exhibitions is the exhibition Calling to Gather. Sisters. Moths and Flames. Bones of Lionesses, Stones and Serpentesses, held at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan between February and July 2024. This exhibition represented Camoni’s largest body of work ever exhibited, flanked by new productions. The installation was conceived as “an architecture of collectivity and recollection,” with a symmetrical, radial plan that creates corridors and environments inspired by ancient amphitheaters and Italianate gardens of the late Renaissance.
The exhibition featured a wide selection of ceramic sculptures, including the anthropomorphic figures from the Sisters series (2017-23) and the Butterfly Vases (2020-22), the latter a reimagining of Egyptian canopic jars. Also included were installations such as the ceramic floor tiles Pavimento (For Clarice) (2021) and curtains made from plant prints Untitled (a Curtain) (2019). New figurative works in materials such as onyx, aluminum, and leccese stone, which draw on the iconography of medieval bestiaries, completed the installation. The exhibition at HangarBicocca was accompanied by a monographic catalog that collected documentation and critical texts by experts such as Anna Anguissola, Domitilla Dardi, Gian Antonio Gilli, Chus Martínez, Alice Motard and Andrea Viliani, delving into the exhibition’s central themes.
Previously, the artist was the protagonist of Ipogea (2021) in the basement of Palazzo Bentivoglio, on the occasion of Art City 2021 in Bologna. Another example of confrontation with antiquity took place at the Luigi Rovati Foundation in Milan (2023-2024), where a selection of her jewelry was displayed alongside Etruscan artifacts and 19th-century jewelry from the Castellani collection, as part of the exhibition Tesori Etruschi. The Castellani Collection Between History and Fashion. This dialogue generated a reflection on the jewelry itself, comparing its Etruscan ornamental nature with the Castellani’s historical-antiquarian research and Camoni’s conceptual and metamorphic practice. Her numerous participations in group exhibitions include the 15th edition of Manifesta in Barcelona (2024), the Quadriennale in Rome in 2020, the exhibition IO DICO IO (2021) at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, and Artifices Instables - Histoires des ceramiques (2020) at NMNM Villa Sauber, Monte Carlo. She is currently represented by SpazioA gallery in Pistoia.
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| Who is Chiara Camoni, the artist who will represent Italy at the Venice Biennale 2026 |
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