April 2025 in Venice: The Ultimate Guide to Art, Exhibitions & Culture

🌸 April 2025 in Venice: Where Art, History & Imagination Bloom Together

Spring in Venice is a mood — a soft light gliding across the lagoon, the scent of wisteria spilling over ancient walls, and the quiet hum of anticipation as museums and palaces open their grand doors to a new season of art.

April is when the city awakens creatively, becoming a living gallery that stretches from St. Mark’s Square to the Giudecca, from Museo Correr to Peggy Guggenheim’s terrace on the Grand Canal.

Whether you’re passionate about Renaissance anatomy, cutting-edge installations, or photography that redefines reality, April 2025 offers a breathtaking lineup of exhibitions that prove Venice is not frozen in time — it’s still shaping it.

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✨ Corpi Moderni at Gallerie dell’Accademia

Dates: April 4 – July 27, 2025
Location: Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

Step back into Renaissance Venice, where artists, scientists, and philosophers chased the mysteries of the human body with divine obsession. The exhibition Corpi Moderni (Modern Bodies) brings together works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Giorgione, and others who dared to redraw the boundaries between flesh and spirit, science and beauty.

The star attraction is Leonardo’s legendary Vitruvian Man — rarely shown to the public, a fragile miracle of ink and geometry that embodies the Renaissance dream of perfect proportion. Seeing it in person feels almost cinematic — as if the drawing breathes.

Surrounding this masterpiece are anatomical models, medical sketches, garments, and manuscripts that reveal how Venice once stood at the frontier of art and medicine. It’s not just an exhibition — it’s a conversation between body and soul, centuries in the making.

🎟️ Book Your Gallerie dell’Accademia Tickets

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🌊 Ocean Space: Art Meets the Sea

Opening: April 5, 2025
Location: Chiesa di San Lorenzo

Inside a deconsecrated church near Campo San Lorenzo, Ocean Space returns as one of Venice’s most innovative venues — where science, art, and activism flow together like tides. This season’s twin exhibitions — “Otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua” and “Echoes of the Sanctuary” — explore the poetry and politics of the sea through immersive soundscapes, film, and sculpture.

Founded by the TBA21–Academy, Ocean Space transforms a historic sacred site into a sanctuary for the planet. Guided tours and lagoon excursions connect visitors with Venice’s fragile ecosystem — and the future it represents.

Entry is free.

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🏛️ Matthias Schaller – Controfacciata at Casa dei Tre Oci

Dates: April 5 – November 23, 2025
Location: Casa dei Tre Oci, Giudecca

Across the water on the Giudecca Island, the elegant Casa dei Tre Oci unveils a haunting new photography exhibition by Matthias Schaller. Controfacciata (“Counter-façade”) captures the invisible sides of Venice’s palaces — the walls that rarely face the camera, the ones that whisper secrets instead of showing off.

These 28 photographs glow with twilight light and quiet melancholy, revealing how Venice’s beauty isn’t just in its grand façades, but in its worn edges, reflections, and silences. A love letter to the city’s hidden geometry.

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🎭 Palazzo Grassi: Tatiana Trouvé – The Strange Life of Things

Dates: April 6, 2025 – January 6, 2026

At Palazzo Grassi, French-Italian artist Tatiana Trouvé invites visitors into a world where objects seem to dream. Her sculptures and installations blur boundaries between memory and matter, drawing you into rooms that feel half-real, half-remembered.

With works from the Pinault Collection and new site-specific creations, this show is expected to be one of the spring’s most talked-about events. Palazzo Grassi — a palace reborn as an idea factory — once again proves that contemporary art belongs perfectly in Venice’s Renaissance frame.

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🧬 Punta della Dogana: Thomas Schütte – Genealogies

Opening: April 6, 2025
Location: Punta della Dogana

In the twin space across the Grand Canal, the minimalist marvel Punta della Dogana hosts Thomas Schütte’s first major Italian exhibition. Known for his ironic, deeply human approach to sculpture and architecture, Schütte’s Genealogies traces decades of creative evolution — from intimate clay models to monumental bronze figures.

Together, the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana exhibitions form a conversation about form and emotion — how humans build, dream, and inhabit space.

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📸 Le Stanze della Fotografia: Two Titans of the Lens

Location: Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
Opening: April 10, 2025

On the tranquil island across from St. Mark’s, Le Stanze della Fotografia opens the season with two monumental retrospectives that redefine what photography can be.

🔲 Robert Mapplethorpe – The Forms of the Classical

Dates: April 10 – November 23, 2025

Over 200 works, including rare vintage prints, reveal Mapplethorpe’s obsession with proportion, symmetry, and sensual perfection. This exhibition reimagines him not only as a photographer but as a sculptor of light — one whose lens carved the human body into marble and myth.

📷 Maurizio Galimberti – Between Polaroid/Ready-Made and Calvino’s American Lessons

Dates: April 10 – July 27, 2025

In contrast, Galimberti’s joyful, kinetic style explodes across the walls in hundreds of Polaroid mosaics. His portraits of Johnny Depp and Barbara Bouchet, his Venetian street scenes, and his visual tributes to Italo Calvino capture the energy of modern life — fragmented, playful, endlessly inventive.

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🖼️ Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space

Dates: April 12 – September 15, 2025

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection continues its tradition of showcasing boundary-breaking modernists with a long-overdue retrospective of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Her paintings turn perspective inside out — labyrinths of light and shadow that seem to breathe.

With nearly 70 works drawn from global collections, the show is a reminder of Peggy’s enduring legacy: to give the unconventional a home on the Grand Canal.

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🧵 Venice Fashion Research 2025

Dates: April 12 – 15, 2025

When art meets elegance, Venice shines. This four-day celebration unites artisans, designers, and scholars to explore the intersection of craftsmanship and innovation. Expect talks, workshops, and runway moments scattered through palaces and ateliers. It coincides with Italy’s National Day of Made in Italy on April 15 — a perfect excuse to explore the city’s thriving creative scene.

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🔮 Le Stanze del Vetro: 1932–1942 – Murano Glass at the Venice Biennale

Dates: April 13 – November 23, 2025

On the island of San Giorgio, Le Stanze del Vetro revisits a luminous decade in Murano’s glass history — from the opening of the Venice Pavilion in 1932 to the turbulent years of World War II. This exhibition reveals how Murano glass became a symbol of modernity, elegance, and resilience — and why it still captivates designers today.

For a hands-on experience, pair your visit with our Murano Glassblowing Workshop or Venetian bead-making class.

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📚 Literature, Ideas & Debate

🌍 Incroci di Civiltà – International Literary Festival

Dates: April 2–5, 2025

Venice opens its doors to writers and thinkers from around the world. Readings, interviews, and intimate conversations light up universities and palazzi — a meeting of voices where East meets West, just as it always has in Venice.

🌐 Festival of European Geopolitics – Mestre

Dates: April 3–5, 2025

Across the lagoon, Mestre hosts debates and panels with diplomats, journalists, and scholars discussing Europe’s place in the changing world — proving that Venice isn’t only about beauty, but also about ideas.

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🌺 In Conclusion: Venice in Full Bloom

April 2025 reminds us why Venice is not just a relic of the past but a beating heart of creativity. From the Vitruvian Man to modern sculptures that defy gravity, from the shimmering glass of Murano to the silver of a Mapplethorpe print — every corner of the city tells a story of reinvention.

Walk slowly, look closely, and let Venice surprise you. And if you want to dive deeper into its artistic soul, join one of our Off-the-Beaten-Path Venice Tours or our Venice Cicchetti & Wine Experience — because art in Venice isn’t only seen, it’s lived.

🎨 Plan Your Art-Filled Visit to Venice with Tour Leader Venice

This spring, the lagoon reflects not just light — but imagination.