Michael Venezia. Blankness as a knowing subject

Finissage, Thursday, February 12, 2026, 6 pm
Catalogue Launch & Talk, 7 pm

Talk in the presence of: Luca Venezia, son of the artist who died in June 2025, Philipp Hindahl, art critic and author, Max Goelitz, gallery owner and co-curator, and Jochen Kienzle.

Michael Venezia was born in New York in 1935 to a family of Italian immigrants. His father was Sicilian, his mother Neapolitan. Venezia grew up in New York; he studied with the Abstract Expressionists and frequented their Manhattan haunts. He took up a day job in the mailroom of MoMA, where Dan Flavin worked as a guard, Robert Ryman too, and Sol LeWitt at the school. They became life-long friends. “I went to the Art Students League of New York,” he recalled in 2019, “where Jackson Pollock had gone to school. I had a teacher who became a close friend, the only person I call my real teacher: Peter Busa. I lived at a time when New York was the centre of the art world.” (Philipp Hindahl, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Michael Venezia,” in Mousse Magazine, May 29, 2019.)

Venezia’s later experiments would further contest conventional panel painting by first using extremely narrow, bar-shaped canvases and, later, in the mid-80s, by painting on long, narrow wooden bars. The pictures—or can they at this point be considered objects?—re- quire the viewer to either stand far away from them and not capture the details (the paint applied with a palette knife, for instance), or to get extremely close and miss the overall picture. Perhaps these are the first works that reflect the position of the viewer explicitly.

– text by Philipp Hindahl

The publication Michael Venezia. Blankness as a knowing subject will be available for purchase at the event.

Related Show: Blankness as a knowing subject, September 12, 2025 – February 14, 2026