Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana

A customs house and the last palace

Palazzo Grassi was rebuilt to Giorgio Massari's design between 1748 and 1772, the last palace raised on the Grand Canal before the fall of the Venetian Republic. Its modern life as an exhibition hall began under Fiat, which bought the building in 1983 while Gianni Agnelli was chairman and had Gae Aulenti strip it back for large travelling shows. François Pinault bought it in May 2005 for 29 million euros, commissioned Tadao Ando to rework the interior, and reopened in April 2006 with roughly 5,000 square metres of exhibition space spread across forty rooms. Jean-Jacques Aillagon, a former French culture minister, was its first director under the new ownership.

The second building sits half a mile south-east, on the triangular spit where the Grand Canal meets the Giudecca canal. The Dogana da Mar was built between 1678 and 1682 to a design by Giuseppe Benoni, on a point that had been used for docking and customs since the early fifteenth century. Pinault secured a 33-year agreement with the City of Venice to run it as a museum, spent around 20 million euros on the conversion, and had Ando at work from January 2008 to March 2009. Punta della Dogana opened to the public on 6 June 2009, with Ando's poured concrete inserted inside the warehouse brick and timber rather than disguising it.

The seasons that built the reputation

The Dogana's opening display, Mapping the Studio, ran from June 2009 to April 2011 and set the pattern: very long installations, drawn mostly from a private holding, rotating on a two-year rather than a two-month clock. Prima Materia followed from May 2013 to February 2015. Damien Hirst's Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, from April to December 2017, remains the most argued-over thing either building has done — a fabricated shipwreck presented as salvage, which split critics almost exactly down the middle. Bruce Nauman's Contrapposto Studies occupied the Dogana from May 2021 to November 2022.

Palazzo Grassi, meanwhile, built a run of single-artist surveys and collection hangs, with Irving Penn and Luc Tuymans among the names and Caroline Bourgeois and Alison Gingeras among the curators. A third space arrived in 2013, when Ando converted the palace's covered garden into the Teatrino, a 225-seat auditorium used for talks, screenings and concerts. Behind all of it is a collection that has passed 10,000 contemporary works, assembled over about two decades, with particular weight in Minimalism, Arte Povera and African-American art.

Palazzo Grassi in 2026: Armitage and Kanwar

Both current Palazzo Grassi exhibitions opened on 29 March 2026 and run until 10 January 2027. The larger is Michael Armitage. The Promise of Change, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais: around forty-five paintings made over the past decade or so, shown alongside more than a hundred studies and drawings. Armitage paints on lubugo, bark cloth beaten from the Ugandan Ficus mutuba, and the seams and holes in the cloth are left visible, so the support interrupts the image. Conjestina, from 2017, takes a Kenyan boxing champion and arranges her in a composition that borrows from Watteau. The Promised Land, from 2019, came out of the artist's own documentation of protests around the 2017 Kenyan election, and a tear in the lubugo does the work that a depicted wound would otherwise have to.

Reviewers have treated it as a mid-career retrospective rather than a victory lap, and the recurring note is that Armitage works at the point where figuration starts to come apart — reportage, myth and memory sitting in the same canvas without the painting telling anyone what to conclude. One Italian review called the result monumental and disturbing in the same sentence, and meant both as praise.

On the second floor is Amar Kanwar. Co-travellers, also curated by Gallais. It pairs The Torn First Pages, made between 2004 and 2008 from archival material about Myanmar's democracy movement and named after a Rangoon bookseller's habit of removing the state-mandated first page from every book he sold, with The Peacock's Graveyard of 2023. The latter fills a darkened central room with seven screens of text and image, carries no filmed figures and no voices, runs 28 minutes with an original raga by the pianist Utsav Lal, and is described by Kanwar as a meditation on death, impermanence and the cycle of life.

Punta della Dogana in 2026: Simpson and Nazareth

Across the water, two shows opened on the same day and close earlier, on 22 November 2026. Lorna Simpson. Third Person is the first substantial European survey of her painting, curated by Emma Lavigne in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the biggest showing of her work in Europe for more than a decade. About fifty pieces made between 2014 and 2025 occupy the ground floor: paintings, collages, screenprints, sculpture and film, borrowed from international collections and the artist's own archive, with new work made for the building. The Ice, Special Characters and Earth and Sky series all appear in depth, a room is given to the 2018 Unanswerable collages, and the route ends with obsidian singing bowls that can be struck.

Lavigne frames the show around the conditions under which images come into being, the erosion and return of memory, and the instability of narratives and their blind spots. Simpson has said the finished object interests her least — that the work is about letting go and seeing what happens. Critics have picked up the gap between how seductive the large paintings are at first glance and how little they settle once looked at properly. The show is supported by Bottega Veneta.

Sharing the building is Paulo Nazareth. Algebra, curated by Fernanda Brenner, which gathers more than two decades of practice together with work never shown before, much of it documentation of long journeys on foot. Nazareth's subject is how colonial cartography and structural racism shaped the landscapes of the modern world, and the Dogana — a point built for the inspection of arriving cargo — is an unusually literal room for it.

Where things stand now

On 15 October 2026 Pinault confirmed the change that will define the next decade of the two buildings. From 21 March 2027, Palazzo Grassi becomes the permanent home of a display drawn from his collection: 106 works by 54 artists, hung as a fixed itinerary rather than a rotating programme. His stated reasoning, given to Le Monde, is that a permanent hang lets works from different periods and generations sit next to one another and show how the same questions keep returning. Twenty-one years of temporary exhibitions at the palace therefore end with Armitage and Kanwar on 10 January 2027.

Punta della Dogana keeps the temporary programme. That splits the two venues for the first time since 2009 — one a collection museum with a settled hang, the other the changing space — and makes the 2026 season the last in which both buildings do the same job.

The visit as it works today

Nothing here is theatrical in the way a staged show is, but the pairing is designed as a single outing. One ticket covers both buildings, which are a ten-minute walk apart through Dorsoduro, past the Salute. Opening is daily except Tuesdays, 10am to 6pm, last admission 5pm, with 25 December closed. Full admission is 20 euros, reduced 15, seven euros for ages 20 to 26, and free under 20, for disabled visitors with a companion, and for several other categories. Venice residents and students at named local universities get in free on Wednesdays, and on the first and last day of each exhibition.

Staff offer cultural mediation — short, unscripted conversations in the galleries rather than a tour — from Saturday to Wednesday, 11am to 1pm and 3pm to 5pm. ATLAS workshops run at Punta della Dogana every Wednesday. Allowing three to four hours for both buildings is realistic given the running times of the film works alone: 28 minutes for The Peacock's Graveyard, plus Simpson's and Nazareth's moving-image pieces.