Visual Fest (Part Six)

Art in Venice in 2007 is clearly obsessed with morbid bodies, whether it admits it or not. The Canadian pavilion in the Giardini, for instance, features a triumphant installation by the London-based artist David Altmejd, with more mirrors, more stuffed squirrels and birds, and more crepuscular tchotchkes than ever before. One highlight is a rooster-headed mannequin in a suit that looks rather like Barney’s "Cremaster." The pavilion climaxes with a Surrealist figure of a reclining giant, his naked body like a vast Gulliver whose parts have been hollowed out and put to use by a race of tiny forest creatures.
David Altmejd in the Canadian pavilion
Next door at the German pavilion, the German artist Isa Genzken has also chosen to line the walls with mirrors, which I always find presumptuous. Genzken’s sculpture is arguably among the most raucous and boundary-breaking being made today, at least within the avant-garde’s circumscribed reality. It’s nothing but assemblage, really, ordinary objects put together without much added fuss from the artist. "Racing Thoughts," indeed.
Isa Genzken’s "Oil," installed in the German pavilion
At the entry is a cemetery of carry-on suitcases draped with posters of cute kittens and dogs. Nearby is a row of skulls on plinths -- there’s our friend Death again, beginning to wear out his welcome -- dressed with Carnival masks and looking up at a some hangman’s nooses, from which a couple of stuffed monkeys gaily swing. High above are suspended three mannequins of astronauts, seemingly floating in outer space. All these mannequins are trying to tell us something. . . maybe that Surrealism is back?
"Astronauts" in Isa Genzken’s "Oil," installed in the German pavilion
At the Palazzo Malipiero near the Palazzo Grassi, the Republic of Cyprus set up its pavilion, which included a series of large photo-realist paintings of luscious fruit on the vine by Mustafa Hulusi, part of a series called "The Elysian Paintings." The London-based Cypriot is described as "an image-based conceptual artist," whose paintings combine "the techniques of fascist propaganda, the bucolic ideal in communist propaganda, and the double nature of kitsch." (Editor:Xie Mu)
Mustafa Hulusi’s "The Elysian Paintings" in the Cyprus pavilion