Evocative Surfaces

To coincide with the 57th Venice Biennale, the Museo di Palazzo Grimani is staging Evocative Surfaces an installation of large-scale paintings by the artist Beverly Barkat. It features a site-specific series of painted PVC sheets produced especially for the spaces of the palazzo. Outset Contemporary Art Fund supports this exhibition.
One of the only High Renaissance palazzos in Venice, this outstanding building was designed by some of the most influential architects of the period – Palladio, Serlio and Sansovino– and boasts an extraordinary decorative scheme and frescoes, including a nude by Giorgione.
Barkat is installing her paintings throughout the palace’s various stanzas, allowing the space to reverberate with the incredible visual and iconographic richness of the Venetian patrician home, to underscore the importance of painting in the late Cinquecento. Viewed as ‘objects of entertainment’, paintings were an integral part of the overall decorative scheme, meant to evoke the grandeur of the Grimani house, as well as the Venetian Republic and its rulers through an Arcadian iconography.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY
Beverly Barkat was born in 1966 (Johannesburg, South Africa) and moved to Israel in 1976. She grew up with parents who were themselves artists and was surrounded by art. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, to then work with clay, metal and glass, and finally she studied oil painting and drawing at Israel Hershberg’s Master Class at the Jerusalem Studio School.
Intensely interested in experimenting with new materials and wanting to discover the potential and power of architectural space, Barkat submerged herself in architectural projects. These included the building and renovation of communal spaces, private homes and libraries in elementary schools with the intention of improving the educational climate. In 2009 Barkat opened her own studio in Jerusalem, where she has continued to develop her own language in art. She has been exploring drawing and painting with mixed media on paper, self-stretched canvasses and PVC, while incorporating the skills and techniques acquired from the various art disciplines in which she specialises. Beverly Barkat has held critically acclaimed exhibitions in Israel and the Far East, while her works have been shown in galleries and art fairs across the globe.