The Peggy Guggenheim Collection has announced its exhibition program for 2026, which will be organized around two exhibitions devoted to as many important chapters in the history of collecting and artistic production in the 20th century. Central to the calendar are the London gallery Guggenheim Jeune, Peggy Guggenheim’s first exhibition experience, and the Fucina degli Angeli, a Murano workshop that marked a season of experimentation in the field of art glass. Both projects will dialogue with the Venetian museum’s permanent collection, offering historical and documentary insights.
With the exhibition dedicated to Lucio Fontana’s ceramics closing on March 2, 2026, the new exhibition season will kick off on April 25 with Peggy Guggenheim in London. Birth of a Collector, on view through Oct. 19, 2026. Curated by Gražina Subelytė, curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and Simon Grant, guest curator, the exhibition examines the period between 1938 and 1939, when Peggy Guggenheim opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London. Active for just over a year, the gallery hosted over twenty exhibitions and established itself as a point of reference for the European avant-garde, presenting, among other things, the first London solo show of Vasily Kandinsky, a monograph on Jean Cocteau, the first group show on collage in the United Kingdom, and an exhibition of contemporary sculpture that elicited strong reactions from the public.
The exhibition project aims to restore the cultural and relational context in which Guggenheim’s activities as a collector and patron matured, highlighting the role of figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Mary Reynolds and Samuel Beckett. The exhibition will bring together about one hundred works from international institutions and private collections, alongside works from the same period by artists such as Eileen Agar, Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and others. It will also include archival materials documenting the climate of cultural experimentation on the eve of World War II. After Venice, the exhibition will land at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in fall 2026 and at the Guggenheim in New York in spring 2027.
The second event is scheduled for the fall with Forge of Angels. Peggy Guggenheim and Twentieth-Century Art Glass, scheduled from November 14, 2026 to March 29, 2027 and curated by art historian Cristina Beltrami. The exhibition reconstructs the story of the Fucina degli Angeli, founded by Egidio Costantini in Murano in the 1950s, through more than one hundred glass works, drawings and historical documents. The exhibition follows the evolution of the workshop up to the 1990s, highlighting collaborations with artists such as George Braque, Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and numerous protagonists of the Japanese art scene. The contribution of Peggy Guggenheim, who supported the project by encouraging its international dissemination and contacts with the U.S. market, is also analyzed. Glass works will be related to paintings and sculptures by the same artists, outlining an articulated picture of the interactions between visual and applied arts in the twentieth century.
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| Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents exhibition program 2026 |
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