I Ritratti Perduti: Maurizio Pellegrin at Marignana Gallery, Venice

For the run of the 61st Venice Biennale, Marignana Gallery has given its main room to Maurizio Pellegrin and to a subject he has been circling for thirty-five years: the face of someone nobody can name any more.

I Ritratti Perduti / The Lost Portraits — 1990–2025 gathers work made across that span in which the portrait keeps returning as a fragmentary, usually anonymous presence. Pellegrin works from an archive rather than from a sitter. He buys, keeps and reworks other people’s images and objects — nineteenth-century oils, albumen prints, drawings from 1919, Japanese plates and carved objects of the Edo period — and then intervenes: an oxide poured over a wooden panel, a strip of black cloth bound across a painted mouth, a red disc set beside a head like a full stop.

What survives the intervention is a trace rather than a likeness. The sitter is displaced out of the ordinary business of representation and becomes something else: a device for thinking about what is present and what is absent, what stays visible and what is forgotten. Against a culture that treats the face as the unit of self-advertisement, these works take identity back to something poetic and collective — suspended, as the gallery puts it, between memory, anonymity and the dissolution of the self.

The Mouths series, from 1992, is the clearest statement of the method: forty-odd albumen prints, each a studio portrait of the sort that survives in every family box, each interrupted by an acrylic mark — a blot, a scatter of dots, a bar — placed where the face wants to be read. Hung as a grid, they stop being individuals and become a wall.

The Venetian artist Maurizio Pellegrin, born in 1956, has shown in more than 150 exhibitions internationally. This is a long look back at one thread of that work, and it is being shown a few minutes’ walk from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in a room whose own old beams are part of the effect.

Practical details

• Run: 22 May – 21 November 2026
• Where: Marignana Gallery, Dorsoduro 141, Rio Terà dei Catecumeni, Venice
• Artist: Maurizio Pellegrin
• Gallery: marignanaarte.it
• Also on now, next door: Before Language / Prima del Linguaggio at Marignana Project

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition for readers planning a visit; it is organised by Marignana Arte and the artist.