Venice, Italy
23 April 2022 –
27 November 2022

The 59^th Venice Biennale presented the work of 213 artists from 58 countries, and was an exciting event for many reasons, not least of which was because Cecilia Alemani was the curator, a first for an Italian woman. It was also the first biennale since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, following the decision to cancel the 2021 iteration and hold it in 2022. Alemani and her team created an immense, multi-part exhibition that included not only contemporary artists from around the globe, but also many female modernists, such as Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (often referred to as Baroness Elsa) and the surrealists Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington. The paintings of these three surrealists were shown at the Giardini in a section entitled “The Witch’s Cradle,” displaying artworks such as Varo’s Simpatía (La rabia del gato) or Madness of the Cat (1955) and Fini’s Femme assise sur un homme nu (1942), which put the biennale into dialogue with the mind-blowing exhibition Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In that exhibition, at least for this viewer, the female surrealists, with their gorgeous dreamscapes full of feline women and hermit-like solitude, far outmatched the male surrealists.

In the contemporary sections of the biennale, there was an immense representation of female artists as well, and while a female curator may not necessarily focus on female artists, Alemani made a conscious decision to

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