Renowned Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen presents his first solo sculptural exhibition in Venice, We Thought We Were Alone, at Palazzo Rota Ivancich, coinciding with the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, running from the 9 May - 22 November 2026. The exhibition, curated by the UK independent curator and writer James Putnam, will feature 40 new sculptures and installations, created specifically for the exhibition. Moving beyond human-centred perspectives, it will explore the dynamic relationship between living organisms and the inorganic environment. Spanning the three floors of the Palazzo’s history-marked, transient structure, the exhibition is a space of sanctuary located in Venice’s Castello district near San Marco. Visitors are immersed in the key themes that define Koen Vanmechelen’s practice - crossbreeding, hybridity, and identity - shaped by his vision of a Cosmopolitan Renaissance. Moving beyond traditional sculpture, the exhibition positions art as a positive force capable of inspiring social and biological transformation. Palazzo Rota Ivancich not only functions as a backdrop but as a structural part of the exhibition: a layered interior where rooms become thresholds, with the building’s own history of repair and reinvention echoing the show’s central theme, reflecting further the interconnectedness of human beings and nature. Moving across three floors, the visitor experiences the palazzo as a ‘cocoon’ - a space where forms loosen, reconfigure, and return changed.

Materials including bronze, marble, glass, photography, and video are brought together to create a dialogue between past and future, a tension between the individual and the collective, matter and form, inheritance and transformation. Classical statuary is reinterpreted amid a diverse menagerie of animal forms, while the works interconnect biology and culture, the local and the global, solitude and solidarity.

​

​

credit photos : KoenVanmechelen