The art of Bizhan Bassir on display in Venice with his ‘Prince’

The project brings together recent works and works that recall the principles and constants of Bassiri’s research, configuring a supra-temporal ‘picture gallery’ that captures and envelops the visitor’s gaze. At the center of the space ‘Prince. The Night Owl of Magmatic Thought’ is the iconographic figure and alter ego of the artist, occupying two of the four entrance thresholds of the Hall of the Four Doors, illuminated by blown glass chandeliers. The cycle of 90 Faces develops around the Prince, photographic elaborations depicting artists from the Renaissance to the present day. Among the faces selected by Bassiri are Piero della Francesca, Donatello, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Gauguin and Alberto Burri. The faces, arranged in a suspended and scalar manner, rise from the lowest levels of the walls up to the maximum height, configuring an ideal family tree that unites different eras and styles. An invitation to visually travel through the history of art through an immersive and enveloping experience.

The cycle of Faces – witnesses chosen by the artist to authenticate a public and symbolic ritual – brings into dialogue themes such as destiny, identity and supra-temporality; they also underline the avoidance of time and history in the conception of the image and suggest a perception of art as a living and continuously transforming experience. The ‘Golden Herm’ – in mirrored bronze – makes the symbolic presence of the timeless identity perceivable and invites us to contemplate the surrounding spaces and light. Next to it, the sculpture ‘Meteorite’ introduces a vertical tension in the space, in perfect dialogue with the other works.

“The Night Owl of Magmatic Thought, the Prince, is the alter ego through which my research manifests itself. In the Hall of the Four Doors, between the Golden Herm – backbone and silent guardian of the space – and the 90 faces of artists from the Renaissance to the present day, each work dialogues with light, materials and architecture”, says Bizhan Bassiri. “The route invites the visitor to perceive art as a living experience, where time, identity and memory intertwine, stimulating deep contemplation and the exercise of the imagination. Here past and present meet, and the Gallery of the Correr Museum opens up to a new reading, capable of evoking reflections on the supra-temporality of art and the strength of creative thought”.

“Art – underlines the curator Chiara Squarcina – is a form of truth capable of activating profound reflections on the values of creativity and aesthetics. In this perspective, the portrait becomes a space of comparison that goes beyond time and places, as happens in the Picture Gallery of the Correr Museum, where the sacred and the profane are told through physiognomies. “With the project conceived by Bizhan Bassiri for the Correr Museum, a new reading of the Picture Gallery is activated: a dialogue between past and present that brings the definition back into play itself as a portrait and opens paths of reflection between art and philosophy, inviting the visitor to train his gaze and imagination”. “In each exhibition event of his work, Bizhan Bassiri takes care to present not only the most recent outcome of his creation, but also works that show principles, rules or distinctive and constant elements, recalling the poetic bases of his aesthetic tension”, says the curator Bruno Corà. “For the Correr Museum I wanted each work to dialogue with space, light and materials, configuring a path in which the past and present of art meet. The exhibition thus offers the visitor a lively and meditative experience, capable of transmitting the supra-temporality of Magmatic Thought and the poetic tension of the artist”.

The common thread of the entire exhibition project is the poetics of Magmatic Thought, developed by Bassiri in 1984 and developed in the Manifesto of Magmatic Thought (1984–2025), a text written by the artist himself which constitutes the theoretical core of his artistic vision and inspires the entire exhibition. Despite the solemnity of the layout, the route is designed for non-rigid use, with the possibility for the visitor to move freely in the space and perceive the relationships between works, architecture and light. The installation integrates heterogeneous materials – papier-mâché, bronze, steel, lava elements and reflective surfaces – in dialogue with the history and monumentality of the Hall of the Four Doors, offering an immersive experience that combines the history of art with contemporaneity.