In Venice, at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Picasso, Morandi, Parmiggiani: Still Lifes is on view until 25 July 2026. This remarkable exhibition explores how objects are made, repeated, or gradually undone.

Curated by Cécile Debray and organised by Tornabuoni Art on the occasion of the 61st Venice Biennale, the exhibition brings together Pablo Picasso, Giorgio Morandi and Claudio Parmiggiani in a deliberately non-linear dialogue. What connects them is less influence or lineage than a recurring return to the object as a question of representation: how reality is staged within the space of the studio, and how that staging is transformed into image.

Picasso treats the still life as rupture. Objects are dismantled, reconfigured through Cubist logic, and set back into motion as unstable structures of perception. Familiar forms, bottles, tables, skulls, instruments, are prevented from settling into recognition, and through reinterpretation, become something else.

Morandi moves in the opposite direction, toward repetition. His modest assemblages of bottles and vessels are arranged and rearranged in the studio with near-liturgical care. This discipline generates variation within constraint: a slow accrual of almost imperceptible differences in tone, spacing and light.

Parmiggiani extends this trajectory into absence. In his works, formed through smoke, soot, shadow and imprint, the object is no longer present but only recalled through its trace. Still life becomes something after the fact: a vanitas reimagined not through depiction, but through residue and disappearance.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition proposes a recalibration of still life itself, for thinking through time, perception and transformation. Venice is the perfect setting, a city that also maintains and transforms.

Image: Pablo Picasso, Crâne de chèvre, bouteille et bougie (1951-53;  painted bronze, 79 x 93 x 54 cm; Musée national Picasso-Paris) © Succession Picasso 2026