The Kienzle Art Foundation announces the exhibition ‘Michael Venezia. Blankness as a knowing subject’ during Berlin Art Week. The exhibition honours the artistic life’s work of the artist, who passed away this year at the age of 89. It is the first presentation of Michael Venezia’s work since his death – and a remembrance and tribute to an extraordinary person whose work shines far beyond his lifetime.
Image above: Michael Venezia, Untitled CVA, 1967, Acryl auf Leinwand, 247,5 x 111,5 x 3 cm. © The artist/Galerie Max Goelitz/Kienzle Art Foundation. Foto: P. Baracchi.
Michael Venezia (born in Brooklyn in 1935) was an important representative of abstract painting in the United States. His artistic milieu was shaped by artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt, with whom he enjoyed lifelong friendships. While many of his colleagues continued to develop primarily sculptural work, Venezia remained committed to painting and developed his own reduced visual language, his own technique and his own new combination systems. He worked on reducing gesture in painting, moving away from brushstrokes and contact with the canvas. Venezia recognised a material quality in colour and was one of the first to use spray guns as tools for his paintings.
One of his first spray-painted works was Untitled, from 1966. The painting was created in London; inspired by airmail envelopes, stripes became the predominant theme in Venezia’s painting. In the so-called ‘Stripe Paintings,’ the paint was sprayed onto the canvas in the form of stripes and bands. Venezia arranged the stripes in such a way that large parts of the canvas remained empty.
One of the central works in the exhibition is the large-format black canvas Untitled, created in New York in 1971, from the ‘Spray Paintings’ series. Michael Venezia worked on the canvas from both edges with seven even sprays. He used an emulsion of aluminium pigments and acrylic paint, which he sprayed onto the horizontal canvas before stretching it.
By using a spray gun and specifying similar, consistently large image formats for his series, Venezia deliberately set limits on his artistic creativity. At the same time, this reduction created new spaces and voids. Venezia worked on several canvases in parallel, allowing the process to take the place of a fixed composition; the outcome of this process remained open, with chance elements being incorporated.
Michael Venezia’s painting is characterised by abstract expressionism; he described himself as a “child of the 1950s”. The joy of experimenting with materials and techniques and the pleasure of the process is very present in all his works and series. His large-format paintings create a strong presence and allow the viewer to immerse themselves in the work and feel an immediate connection. Venezia was at the centre of the 20th-century avant-garde and went his own way from there. ‘I like being on the periphery. I don’t like being in the nucleus,’ he said, and it is precisely these artists that the Kienzle Art Foundation focuses on: artists of art-historical relevance who remained on the fringes of the scene in their day and whom the foundation wants to help gain the attention they deserve.
Michael Venezia has been featured in group exhibitions at MoMA, New York, followed by exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOCA Miami, the Kienzle Art Foundation, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the Dia Centre for the Arts, Dan Flavin Art Institute, Bridgehampton, Long Island, US, the Josef Albers Museum Bottrop and the Kunstmuseum Heilbronn, among others.
Blankness as a knowing subject primarily displays works – large-format canvases and smaller works on paper – from the 1960s and 70s. We would like to thank Max Goelitz and Wolfgang Häusler for their cooperation. Without their support, this exhibition would not have been possible.
A collaboration between the Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin, and Galerie Max Goelitz, Berlin | Munich, at the Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin.
Curated by Jochen Kienzle and Max Goelitz.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Friday, 12 September 2025 – Saturday, 14 February 2026
Opening hours:
Thursday – Friday, 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Saturday, 2:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
WHERE?
Kienzle Art Foundation
Bleibtreustraße 54
10623 Berlin
