Until February 28, 2026, the Canova Rooms at the Museo Correr host the first chapter of “Dialoghi Canoviani”, a new exhibition series dedicated to encounters between Antonio Canova’s neoclassical sculpture and contemporary artistic research. The inaugural edition features American artist Karen LaMonte with her exhibition “Nocturnes”, curated by Chiara Squarcina and Eraldo Mauro.
Renowned for her extraordinary ability to investigate the human figure through subtraction, LaMonte’s work explores the relationship between body, absence, and material. Beginning from the “container”—the dress—she meticulously reconstructs every fold and thread, achieving a tactile precision that blurs the line between realism and abstraction. Her sculptures, created through complex glass fusion techniques, evoke a feminine presence that is at once ethereal and ghostly, suspended in a timeless dimension of transparency and silence.
With Nocturnes, LaMonte deepens her poetic research, guiding viewers through an evocative world of nocturnal tones, where the gradations of blue recall the slow passage from twilight to night. Each piece becomes a meditation on form and light—solid yet elusive, tangible yet immaterial.
In dialogue with Canova’s neoclassical ideals, LaMonte’s art offers a counterpoint: where Canova animated matter with lifelike perfection, she seeks to capture the trace of what is missing—a presence defined by absence. Her sculptures, like spectral garments molded from night air, invite viewers to look beyond surface and substance, revealing a quiet, contemplative beauty.
“Nocturnes” thus opens the Dialoghi Canoviani series with a reflection on the eternal interplay between classicism and contemporaneity, light and shadow, being and void.
Website: www.visitmuve.it
Location: Correr Museum, Venice
Schedule: until February 28, 2026
