XVI Florence Biennale 2027

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Italia
Florence
XVI Florence Biennale 2027

International Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Design in Florence
Fortezza da Basso | 23 - 31 October 2027

The XIV Florence Biennale, which will take place at the Fortezza da Basso (Florence, Italy), from 14 to 22 October 2023, will engage participating artists and visitors in a rich programme of artistic and cultural activities. Aside from the main exhibition, there will be collateral events, performances, workshops, conferences, and lectures relating to the theme of the new edition: "I Am You. Indivi

dual and Collective Identities in Contemporary Art and Design". Founded in 1997, the Florence Biennale is the major contemporary art and design exhibition in Florence (Italy) and one of the world's leading contemporary art exhibitions. More than 450 artists and designers from 71 countries participated in the latest edition (XIII Florence Biennale 2021), which has been held under the patronage of the European Parliament, Italian Commission for UNESCO, Italian Ministry of Culture, Tuscany Region, and Municipality of Florence, and was attended by more than 10,000 visitors. Within the framework of the Florence Biennale, the “Lorenzo il Magnifico” Lifetime Achievement Award (for Art) and the “Leonardo da Vinci” Lifetime Achievement Awards (for Design) are conferred to individuals who have reached pinnacles of artistic achievement for their contribution to culture: Marina Abramović, Gustavo Aceves, Refik Anadol, Sauro Cavallini, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, David Hockney, El Anatsui, Arata Isozaki, Salvatore & Wanda Ferragamo, Ferrari & Pininfarina, Gilbert & George, Anish Kapoor, Elsa Peretti (Tiffany & Co.), Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paula Scher, Oliviero Toscani, Vivienne Westwood, and Franco Zeffirelli are among the recipients of the past editions. The first announced winner of “Lorenzo il Magnifico” Lifetime Achievement Award of the XIV Florence Biennale 2023 is world-renowned American photographer and filmmaker David LaChapelle.

07/09/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Alain Jean •

Alain Jean is a Belgian self-taught contemporary abstract artist and lifelong photographer whose body of work explores the intersection of photography, digital manipulation, and optical illusion. Working without AI, and exclusively from photographs he has personally captured and transformed, he creates immersive Op Art compositions that challenge perception and draw viewers into a dynamic visual experience. Known as the creator of the “optical-illusion iris,” Alain develops artworks that are both highly graphic and deeply immersive, transforming familiar imagery into vibrating fields of colour, depth, and movement. His pieces shift as the eye moves, creating an experience that is intimate, disorienting, and unforgettable. Viewers often feel drawn into the work, as if immersed in a bath of energy.

Rooted in abstraction yet shaped by photographic source material, Alain’s practice bridges technology, perception, and emotional presence. His distinctive approach expands the language of contemporary optical art and establishes a singular visual signature within today’s abstract art landscape. He has exhibited in Belgium and abroad, including France, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy.

04/09/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Luigi Settembrini •

Following his participation in 2009 and 2021 editions, next year will mark Luigi Settembrini’s third participation in the Florence Biennale. Luigi Settembrini is a visual artist and scenographer who investigates perception as an operative structure. His practice moves across painting, installation, and scenographic experimentation, articulating a language that pushes essentially toward a radical dimension, where every element operates as a perceptual function. Trained in Set Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he has developed a transdisciplinary practice in which materials, light, and structure act as relational systems.

Settembrini has participated in exhibitions both in Italy and abroad, including the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, and ARTIST 360 – Feria de Arte in Madrid. His work is featured in national and international catalogues, publications, and collections.

Luigi Settembrini Artist

03/09/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Sabine Josefine Balerna •

Swiss artist Sabine Josefine Balerna explores space — and, with it, the notion of the interstitial — in works that transcend the two-dimensional image to become sculptural objects. Through her distinctive artistic language, expressed in both painting and whimsical sculptural forms, Balerna seeks to capture the intangible, to grasp time and understand the texture of words. Her gracefully suspended installations, rendered in translucent and delicate colours, invite viewers into an immersive experience. They encourage participation, draw the imagination into a poetic narrative, and offer an invitation to pause and “lose oneself”. Balerna invites viewers to surrender to these free artistic interpretations and enter an intimate dialogue with the poetic worlds she creates.

The experience of being a woman and an artist informs Balerna’s practice. Themes of personal growth and transformation, powerlessness and courage, all shape her vision. For Balerna, remaining deeply rooted in her chosen medium while embracing curiosity, experimentation, and unconventional approaches is a continual process of discovering and reinventing. She considers it a privilege to draw upon her rich artistic understanding, opening her perspective and interpretations of the world to others. Since 1989, she has exhibited extensively throughout Switzerland, with exhibitions in Bern, Worb, Biel/Bienne, and many other cities.

02/09/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Anrien Reigell •

Anrien Reigell is a contemporary Hungarian pastel artist whose work explores the space between realism and expressive painting. Rooted in the Baroque tradition of light and chiaroscuro, he combines classical observation with a contemporary visual language shaped by expressive gesture and atmosphere. At the core of his artistic practice are still life, light, silence, and presence. Glass objects, birds, flowers, and everyday forms transformed into quiet reflections on fragility, memory, and the traces of human existence. His still lifes are not merely arrangements of objects, but contemplative compositions that invite viewers to look beyond appearances and discover emotional and symbolic depth.

What distinguishes his work is a recurring tension between presence and absence — ordinary objects carry the weight of what is no longer there, transforming the familiar into something quietly unsettling and deeply human. Working primarily with dry pastel, Reigell explores the medium’s rich layering possibilities while maintaining an expressive tension between observation and gesture. His work balance careful observation with expressive interpretation, preserving both the discipline of form and the freedom of painterly expression. Through light, atmosphere, and silence, ordinary subjects in his paintings transcend their everyday presence, encouraging viewers to slow down, observe, and rediscover the extraordinary within the familiar.

Anrien Reigell

01/09/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Joy Gardner •

Joy Gardner is a US interdisciplinary artist and resides in Saint Petersburg, Florida. She learned photography from her father. Together, they explored the many great National Parks in America. There, she found both strength and serenity in nature. Those early memories sparked a lifelong curiosity and love of travel. It became a portal to the world to view epic landscapes and interesting cultural perspectives.

Her curiosity learning about the works of famous landscape photographers Ansel Adams and Clyde Butcher has impacted her work, focusing on Pictorialism, which favours atmospheric painterly images over straightforward documentation. Thus, Joy’s aesthetic choices enlighten the work with its uniqueness. Challenged by tradition, her photography employs techniques to soften details or emphasise moods to create a kind of sensory perception of place. Joy’s work is found in private collections in the US and internationally.

31/08/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Irina Iosip •

Romanian artist Irina Iosip holds a master’s degree from the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design at the George Enescu National University of Art in Iași. She views art as a sublime form of emotional, spiritual, and cultural awakening, with her practice centred on existential questions such as: “Through what forces and laws, and for how long, do we exist?”, “What is our role and destiny in this infinite existence?”. Some of her paintings are centred around the primordial element of water, which she considers magical: it sustains life and gives life, allows light to pass through, reflect, or be absorbed, and can transform its form, state, and energy. It has power to cleanse both the living and the non-living of what is not conductive to the supreme good. Iosip works with dry pastel, a medium that conveys the vibration of emotions and reveals the wondrous transformation of shades shaped by the intensity and direction of light.

Iosip has participated in numerous biennials and group exhibitions held in major cultural centres across Romania, including Bacău, Brăila, Bucharest, Buzău, Cluj, Iași, Galați, and Timișoara, among many others. Her work has also been presented internationally in countries such as Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Japan, Moldova, Poland, and Russia.

Irina Iosip

28/08/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Radoslava Manova - Radé •

Radoslava Manova – Radé was born in 1971 in Pernik, Bulgaria. She now lives and paints in a small village, where she has found a shared spiritual world in which humanity, God, the Earth, and nature exist in harmony. Manova’s artworks leave traces — traces created with the intensity that the artist is able to imprint through her chosen tools. These traces embody the energy of movement, colours, marks, and incisions that take form and substance on the canvas, becoming a tangible visual language. Through these elements of her authentic, seemingly primordial expression, Manova transforms her recurring subjects into a mythological vortex, where pictorial echoes of Post-Impressionism and Expressionism merge into a unique system of contemporary spirituality.

Manova is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists. She has presented her artworks in numerous solo exhibitions, artistic projects, and events in Bulgaria, Portugal, Italy, and Serbia. Her work has also been featured in prestigious national and international collective exhibitions, including “Human Rights” in Italy, the “International Eastern Salon of Art” in Poland, the International Biennale “The Art of Miniature” in Ruse, Bulgaria, as well as national exhibitions in Razgrad, Burgas, Silven in Bulgaria, and many others.

Radoslava Manova

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27/08/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Nadia Bussacchini •

A returning artist from the previous edition, Italian visual artist Nadia Bussacchini intertwines her rich cultural heritage with global artistic influences, shaping a career rooted in classical techniques and deep artistic exploration. Originally from Brescia, Italy, she refined her skills under the guidance of master artists, later expanding her knowledge in art history and painting abroad. Her practice reflects a deep appreciation for the mastery of light and shadow, as well as the disciplined traditions of the “scuola bottega” method.

Bussacchini’s work has been exhibited internationally, from Mexico City and Texas to Switzerland, Italy, and Morocco, earning acclaim for its cultural depth and technical precision. At the Florence Biennale 2025, she presented three paintings: “Contemplation,” “The Light Within,” and “Revelation.” In recent years, she has also participated in the collective exhibition “Ventanas de México” in Japan, organised by Fomento Cultural México in collaboration with the Embassy of Mexico in Japan. Additionally, she has recently showcased her work at the “Annual Juried Exhibition” in Virginia and in New York.

26/08/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Salama Al Mazrouei •

Salama Al Mazrouei is an Emirati visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the relationship between memory, identity, and belonging. Working primarily with mixed media, she combines painting, raw cotton canvas, textiles, and layered textures to create contemporary works rooted in the cultural heritage and landscapes of the United Arab Emirates. Her artistic language bridges tradition and modernity, transforming personal and collective memories into immersive visual narratives. Drawing inspiration from nature, Emirati symbolism, and human connection, her work reflects on the enduring bonds between people, place, and cultural identity.

For the XVI Florence Biennale, Al Mazrouei presents “Echoes of Belonging,” a series comprising “The Memory of Place,” “AMAN,” and “Naashat.” Together, these works explore memory as a living presence that transcends time through landscape, protection, and human relationships. The series invites viewers to consider how identity is shaped by the places we inhabit, the values we inherit, and the connections we share. The recipient of the Arab Woman Award in Arts (2013), Al Mazrouei has participated in more than one hundred exhibitions nationally and internationally. Through her work, she seeks to preserve cultural narratives while engaging in a contemporary dialogue that resonates across cultures.

25/08/2026

Meet the artist of the XVI Florence Biennale (Fortezza da Basso, Firenze 23-31 October 2027) ✨

• Carina Wagenaar •

Born in 1969, Dutch artist Carina Wagenaar studied Fine Art in Amsterdam and creates life-sized medallions that reinterpret the historic cameo as contemporary sculptural wall works. Inspired by cameos, lace, relics, and narrative symbolism, her intricate compositions explore memory, emotion, spirituality, and the complexities of contemporary life. Working behind semi-circular acrylic glass, Wagenaar constructs immersive miniature worlds from an eclectic collection of found and reclaimed objects. Sustainability is central to her practice: by transforming existing materials into new visual narratives, she reveals unexpected beauty while giving overlooked objects a renewed purpose.

The medallion — traditionally a vessel for preserving treasured memories—serves as both framework and metaphor. Every artwork tells a story through carefully layered symbolism, inviting the viewer to decipher hidden meanings and make personal connection. Classical references merge seamlessly with playful and contemporary elements, creating works that are both intimate and monumental. Since 2015, Wagenaar has exhibited internationally in cities including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Florence, Paris, New York, Dubai, among many others. She was nominated for the “Van Gogh Prize 2015” by the Van Gogh Museum and has received awards including “Most Innovative D’Art Interior Decor Artist 2020” from BUILD Magazine, and “Most Innovative Contemporary Artist 2021” from EU Business News.

Carina Wagenaar

Indirizzo

Fortezza Da Basso, Viale Strozzi 1
Florence
50144

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+390553249173

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http://www.florencebiennale.org/

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