Venice occupies a singular position in the international art calendar. With the 61st Venice Art Biennale — titled In Minor Keys and curated by the late Koyo Kouoh — opening on 9 May 2026 and running through 22 November, the city will once again draw a concentrated global audience of collectors, curators, museum professionals, and critics. For those working in or adjacent to the art trade, the institutional programme is only part of the picture. Venice sustains a network of private commercial galleries that operates year-round, independent of the Biennale's rhythms, and it is this ecosystem that rewards closer examination.
The private gallery landscape in Venice is genuinely unusual. The city's physical constraints — no roads, no large loading bays, a labyrinthine street plan — make conventional logistics costly and complicated. Yet these same qualities have consistently drawn galleries willing to invest in the long term. A number of significant international dealers have opened Venetian spaces over the past decade, joining a core group of locally rooted galleries, and together they form a market ecosystem that is smaller and less publicly legible than those of London, New York, or Paris, but no less serious.
The city's own gallery association, Venice Galleries View, now brings together seventeen spaces and hosts an annual Gallery Weekend, the 2026 edition of which takes place on 27, 28 and 29 March — just weeks before the Biennale's institutional season opens. The weekend is structured as a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood route, beginning in Dorsoduro and Giudecca on the Friday, moving through San Marco and Castello on the Saturday, and concluding in San Polo and Cannaregio on the Sunday. An invitation-only collector event is held at Spazio Berlendis on the Saturday evening. For art professionals, this weekend offers a concentrated opportunity to visit multiple galleries in a short period, meet the gallerists directly, and take stock of the market before the institutional crowds arrive.
What follows is an account of the principal private galleries operating in Venice in 2026, with notes on their programmes and current or forthcoming exhibitions.
Victoria Miro Venice
Victoria Miro's Venetian outpost opened in May 2017 in a seventeenth-century building in the heart of the San Marco district, in the former Galleria Il Capricorno — a space with its own long history in the Venetian art world, previously directed for years by dealer Bruna Aickelin. The gallery carries the canal-side address of Calle Drio La Chiesa 1994, and runs a year-round exhibition programme in a relatively intimate space that Victoria Miro herself has described as designed to give artists an opportunity to respond to the city rather than to drive commercial outcomes directly.
Since opening with an exhibition of Chris Ofili's work, the Venice gallery has presented an international roster that includes Yayoi Kusama, Sarah Sze, Chantal Joffe, Paula Rego, Do Ho Suh, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, among others. A number of shows have originated from residencies the gallery facilitates in Venice, and this model — artist residency leading to Venice exhibition — has become a distinctive feature of the Miro programme. In early 2026, the gallery presented new paintings and works on paper by Emil Sands completed during such a residency (3 February to 7 March 2026). Victoria Miro participates in the Venice Gallery Weekend and is regarded within the Venice Galleries View network as a significant international anchor.
Galleria Alberta Pane
Alberta Pane opened her Paris gallery in 2008 and brought the programme to Venice in 2017, choosing a former carpenter's workshop of around 350 square metres in the Dorsoduro district, at Calle dei Guardiani 2403/H. The space has been developed as an exhibition and research platform, with workshops and discussions as well as formal gallery exhibitions forming part of the annual calendar. The programme is conceptually focused, with a particular emphasis on installation, volume, and spatial perception, and the gallery has consistently worked with artists whose practices address identity, materiality, and the politics of representation.
Artists presented over the years have included Luciana Lamothe — who represented Argentina at the 2024 Venice Biennale — alongside Christian Fogarolli, Marie Lelouche, Esther Stocker, Claude Cahun (in survey format), and Gayle Chong Kwan. The gallery's Dorsoduro venue is currently undergoing renovation and is expected to reopen to the public in early May 2026. The most significant event confirmed for the Venice space in 2026 is an exhibition of work by Judy Chicago — The Materiality of Judy Chicago, curated by Allison Raddock — scheduled to run from May through November, coinciding with the Biennale period.
Galleria Michela Rizzo
Founded in 2004 with an express intention of offering an alternative to Venice's predominantly commercially oriented gallery culture, Galleria Michela Rizzo has occupied its current home — a former industrial brewery building on the Giudecca island, at Fondamenta San Biagio 800/q — since 2013. The shift to a large-format industrial space gave the gallery considerably more room to commission and present site-specific installations, and this has remained a defining characteristic of its programme.
The gallery represents artists including Fabio Mauri, Antoni Muntadas, Hamish Fulton, Riccardo Guarneri, Brian Eno, Francesco Jodice, Mariateresa Sartori, and David Rickard. A recent exhibition — Quando il cielo finisce (When the sky ends) — ran from November 2025 through February 2026. The Giudecca location places it slightly off the beaten path for gallery visitors, but this has become part of the gallery's identity, and the industrial setting has proven generative for artists working with space and materiality.
https://galleriamichelarizzo.net
Galleria Alberta Pane (see above), Marignana Arte, and the Dorsoduro Concentration
The Dorsoduro district forms the densest concentration of contemporary art activity in private hands. In addition to Galleria Alberta Pane, the district is home to Marignana Arte, founded in 2013 by Emanuela Fadalti and Matilde Cadenti at Rio Terà Catecumeni 140/141, positioned between the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the Pinault Foundation's Punta della Dogana. The gallery occupies a ground-floor space of approximately 68 square metres in a Gothic palace, with an adjacent project room dedicated to emerging practice, and has expanded since 2021 with Spazio Berlendis in Cannaregio — a restored historical carpentry workshop that accommodates exhibitions, concerts, and cultural events, and which serves as the venue for the Venice Gallery Weekend's evening collector event.
Marignana Arte's programme covers a range of practices, with past solo exhibitions by Maurizio Donzelli, Mariella Bettineschi, Nancy Genn, and Verónica Vázquez, alongside group exhibitions organised around thematic threads. The gallery has collaborated with Ca' Pesaro, the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, the Botanical Garden of Padua, the Department of Culture and Tourism of Abu Dhabi, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
Patricia Low Contemporary
Established in Gstaad in 2005, Patricia Low opened her Venice space in 2023, positioning it directly on what the gallery itself describes as Dorsoduro's museum mile, at Calle del Tragheto, Dorsoduro 2793, within walking distance of the Gallerie dell'Accademia, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Palazzo Cini Gallery, and Palazzo Grassi. The gallery has worked with artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Jonathan Meese, and Gilbert & George over its twenty-year history, and the Venice outpost is intended to bring this programme into sustained contact with the city's institutional density.
The Ocula platform listed Patricia Low Contemporary's exhibition Sirens of Venice by Jordan Kerwick as running from 22 November 2025 through 24 January 2026. The gallery participates in the Venice Gallery Weekend on the Friday Dorsoduro route.
Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea
Founded in Bergamo in 1991 under the name D'Arte & Divetro, Caterina Tognon moved to Venice in 1998 — first to Campo San Maurizio, then to the noble floor of a seventeenth-century palazzo in 2004, and finally, in 2015, to its current location at Ca' Nova di Palazzo Treves, Corte Barozzi 2158, San Marco, adjacent to the St. Regis Hotel and a short walk from Piazza San Marco. Unusually for Venice's contemporary gallery scene, the gallery's programme is built around artists who work with glass — whether as their primary medium or as a significant material within a broader practice — and it represents the international Studio Glass movement in Italy.
The gallery's roster moves between the historically anchored traditions of Murano glass and contemporary sculptural practice, collaborating with artists from Italy, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Recent and upcoming exhibitions have included solo presentations of artists such as Mel Douglas and Richard Marquis, and work by Lilla Tabasso. Caterina Tognon also participates in TEFAF Maastricht. The gallery has partnered with major Venetian civic institutions including Ca' Rezzonico, Museo Correr, and Ca' Pesaro.
https://www.caterinatognon.com
Galleria d'Arte Contini
One of the longest-established private galleries in Venice, Galleria d'Arte Contini was founded in 1979 by Stefano Contini and now operates four spaces: two in the historic centre of Venice, near Piazza San Marco, and two in Cortina d'Ampezzo. The gallery has built its reputation on large-scale figurative work by major international names, representing artists including Fernando Botero, Robert Indiana, and the estates of Igor Mitoraj, as well as contemporary sculptors such as Manolo Valdés and Lorenzo Quinn.
In 2025 and 2026, the gallery's Venice programme includes a two-person exhibition — Museo Infinito — presenting work by sculptor Park Eun Sun and architect Mario Botta, which runs from 27 December 2025 through 6 April 2026. Contini participates in international art fairs and its Venice spaces operate Monday through Sunday.
La Galleria Dorothea van der Koelen
Founded in 2001 by the art historian Dorothea van der Koelen, this gallery occupies a space in Palazzo Treves at Corte Barozzi, close to Piazza San Marco — the same building that houses Caterina Tognon. Van der Koelen has worked in the field of conceptual and Minimalist art for over forty years, and the gallery's programme reflects her particular commitment to artists working within these traditions. A large illuminated text work by Joseph Kosuth is visible through the gallery's windows facing the Teatro La Fenice. The gallery participates in the Venice Gallery Weekend on the Saturday San Marco–Castello route.
Sist'Art Gallery
Located directly on Piazza San Marco, Sist'Art presents both emerging and established contemporary artists with a stated emphasis on collectors and a professional, transaction-oriented environment. The gallery describes itself as operating with "integrity" in the collector market.
The Broader Context: Venice Biennale 2026 and the Institutional Backdrop
For art professionals visiting in 2026, the private gallery scene operates against an unusually concentrated institutional backdrop. The 61st Venice Art Biennale (In Minor Keys, 9 May to 22 November 2026) is the primary event, but it is accompanied by major museum exhibitions that will shape collector and curatorial attention throughout the year.
At Palazzo Grassi, the Pinault Collection opens four simultaneous solo exhibitions from 29 March 2026, including a substantial survey of Michael Armitage's paintings from the past decade, and a new installation by Indian artist Amar Kanwar. At Ca' Pesaro, the first major Venetian exhibition dedicated to Jenny Saville opens on 28 March and runs through 22 November 2026, tracing her career from the 1990s to the present with previously unseen new works created for Venice. The same venue presents a new exhibition of work by Adriana Varejão from 7 May through 30 August 2026. At the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Marina Abramović becomes the first living female artist to receive a major solo exhibition at the institution in a show running 6 May through 19 October 2026.
This institutional concentration creates an environment in which private galleries can draw on foot traffic and collector attention that is genuinely global during the Biennale preview period. For gallery professionals, the weeks between the Venice Gallery Weekend (27–29 March) and the Biennale preview (early May) represent the most commercially active period outside the Biennale itself, and it is in this window that many of the city's private dealers conduct the bulk of their relationship-building and transactional activity.
A Note on Sales and the Market
The commercial dynamics of Venice's private gallery scene are shaped by several distinctive features. The city draws an unusually high proportion of collector visitors from outside Italy, and galleries such as Victoria Miro have reported making sales to international collectors through their Venice presence. Victoria Miro has noted that its Venice space was "not necessarily market-led" in conception but that significant sales to international collectors have been made since opening. The Biennale period functions, in the words of collector Alain Servais, as "the world's best art fair," with dealers managing collector relationships and conducting sales in hotel rooms, palazzi, and exhibition spaces simultaneously.
Specific transaction data from Venice's private galleries is, as is standard in the field, not publicly disclosed. What is clear is that the arrival of galleries with strong international programmes — Victoria Miro, Patricia Low, Alberta Pane — has raised the overall commercial register of the private scene without displacing the longer-established local and regional galleries that form its foundation.
Venice Galleries View
The Venice Galleries View association now coordinates seventeen galleries across Venice and Mestre. It maintains a website and interactive map, and its annual Gallery Weekend is the principal event through which the network presents itself collectively to an international audience. Institutions and professionals wishing to engage with the full range of the city's private gallery activity should consult the association directly.
https://www.venicegalleriesview.com
This article was prepared in February 2026. Exhibition dates and gallery details are subject to change; readers are advised to verify current information directly with each gallery before travel.