Sotheby’s Venice guide

Sotheby’s dropped a Venice 2026 guide on April 9, one month before the public opening of the 61st Venice Biennale on May 9, and the pitch is simple: if you only plan around the Giardini and the Arsenale, you will miss half the city-sized show that forms around them. (sothebys.com) (labiennale.org) That timing matters because the Biennale’s preview days run May 6, May 7, and May 8, when curators, collectors, and journalists fan out across palazzos, churches, foundations, and museums for openings that sit outside the main exhibition grounds. (labiennale.org) The official exhibition is called In Minor Keys, and La Biennale di Venezia says it was conceived by Koyo Kouoh and will still be carried out after her death with the support of her family and team. (labiennale.org) The scale explains why a city guide is useful at all: La Biennale says the 2026 edition includes 111 invited participants in the central exhibition, plus 99 national participations and 31 collateral events spread across Venice. (labiennale.org) Sotheby’s answer is not to catalog everything. It picks a route through the overflow, treating Venice less like one fairground and more like a dense archipelago of temporary shows linked by vaporetto stops, courtyards, and 15-minute walks. (sothebys.com) One anchor in that route is Marina Abramović’s Transforming Energy at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, which Sotheby’s says runs from May 6 to October 19 and includes Rhythm 0, the 1974 performance built around 72 objects placed on a table for the public to use on her body. (sothebys.com) Sotheby’s frames that show as a collision between living performance art and old-master Venice, because Abramović’s works are installed beside Renaissance paintings in one of the city’s major museums rather than inside a purpose-built contemporary art hall. (sothebys.com) Another stop it highlights is Jenny Saville at Ca’ Pesaro, where Sotheby’s says about 30 paintings from across her career will be shown through November 22, the same day the Biennale closes. That pairing turns a museum visit into a parallel reading of the Biennale’s full seven-month run. (sothebys.com) (labiennale.org) This is how Venice works during Biennale season: the official show gives the calendar and the crowd, and everyone else builds around that surge with exhibitions timed to the same week and aimed at the same audience. Sotheby’s is packaging that sprawl into a shortlist for people who do not have four days to wander every sestiere blindly. (sothebys.com) (labiennale.org) So the real news is not just that Sotheby’s published another art-world itinerary. It is that Venice 2026 is already being treated as a citywide event before opening day, with the main Biennale acting as the spine and private foundations, historic museums, and satellite exhibitions supplying the rest of the body. (sothebys.com) (labiennale.org)