A major survey of Barry X Ball, will be presented at the historic Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, opening on 9 May and coinciding with the opening of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Titled The Shape of Time and curated by Bob Nickas, the exhibition will feature 23 artworks, with most of these works being shown to the public for the first time. The exhibition will highlight sculptures from five distinct series, each installed in carefully selected locations within the basilica, activating the space through a dialogue between past and present. Situated on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in the UNESCO-listed Venice Lagoon, the exhibition reflects the Benedictine community’s long-standing mission to preserve and promote cultural heritage. Its opening also coincides with the unveiling of the restoration of two monumental paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto The Last Supper and The Israelites in the Desert in the basilica’s presbytery.

Within Andrea Palladio’s architectural masterpiece, Barry X Ball’s sculptures will enter into conversation with the sacred architecture of the basilica, reinterpreting historical forms through a bold and experimental contemporary language. The presentation is coordinated by Carmelo A. Grasso, Director and Institutional Curator of Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, ETS branch.

Holy Body

Two monumental portrait sculptures will be installed among the richly carved wooden stalls of the basilica’s Choir. Pope Saint John Paul II will serve as one of the exhibition’s central works. The sculpture, created over 12 years, is made from solid silver and 18K gold, and was realised in collaboration with the renowned Italian jewellers Damiani.

Three recent stone Buddha sculptures will be shown in the Sacristy, arranged in a cruciform composition. Bringing Catholic faith and Buddhist philosophy into proximity, the works reveal the ecumenical dimension of the artist’s practice. Among them is Mirrored Buddha Herms, which creates a visual and conceptual exchange between a 15th-century Japanese sculpture and Ball’s mirrored interpretation in Belgian black marble.

Barry X Ball, Buddha, 2018–2023. Belgian black marble; Vietnamese white marble penetrated plinth and Gogotte-form genitalia; 24K gold-plated metal

Three monumental sculptures from the ongoing Masterpieces series will be installed in the Nave and Transept: Pietà, Saint Bartholomew Flayed, and Saint Bartholomew Flayed, Ascension.

Pietà is inspired by Michelangelo’s unfinished Pietà Rondanini. Ball and his team 3D-scanned the original sculpture and its Roman grave stele plinth in Milan in 2011, before digitally modelling the work to introduce a series of formal and conceptual shifts. The pedestal was reimagined as a tapering obelisk integrated with the sculpture itself. Carved from translucent golden-white Iranian onyx, the work has an ethereal luminosity, enhanced by contrasting surface treatments including robot-milled fluting, matte passages, and mirror-polished sections.

Barry X Ball, Enthroned Pope, Reflected, 2013–2024. Translucent “wounded” Mexican onyx, 24K gold-plated steel and aluminium, stainless steel base: lacquered solid aluminium, optical mirror, stainless steel

Sculptural lineage

Ten works from Barry X Ball’s ongoing Medardo Rosso Project will be presented in the long corridor connecting the main nave and transept spaces to the Sacristy. An additional sculpture, Sacristan, will be displayed in the Sacristy alongside the Buddhas, while Enthroned Pope, Reflected, a monumental work inspired by Medardo Rosso’s Sick Man in the Hospital, will be installed in the north branch of the transept.

The project began in 2012, when Ball worked with the Vicenza-based technical company UnoArte to 3D-scan 39 sculptures by Rosso from Italian museums and private collections. Using a Breuckman white-light scanner, the team captured the surfaces and volumes of the works in extraordinary detail, producing highly precise digital records. Ball later refined this material in his New York studio, combining the scan data with extensive digital photography. The resulting sculptures use this technical foundation as a point of departure for new works that preserve the force and mystery of Rosso’s originals.

Early and Late Works

The earliest work in the exhibition, Largen 1 (Before / After Giotto), made in 1982–1983, will be displayed at the end of a section of the basilica’s winding corridor, near the Medardo Rosso Project works. Made with wood, wax, linen, gesso, bole, and 23K gold, materials associated with Late-Gothic and Early-Renaissance Italian painting, the piece exists between painting and sculpture: wall-mounted and frontal, yet physically and materially sculptural.

The Benedictine community has also commissioned Ball to create The Word, a stone sculpture in the form of a book. Inspired by the Lindau Gospels in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, the work will become part of the Abbey’s collection of contemporary illuminated manuscripts, launched in 2019 through collaborations with artists connected to the Abbey.

This presentation marks Barry X Ball’s third participation in the Biennale context, following his exhibitions at Ca’ Rezzonico in 2011 and Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in 2019. It demonstrates his long engagement with Venice as both a symbolic and material locus of art history. Yet The Shape of Time also marks the coming together of two critically engaged figures in contemporary art, Ball and Nickas, whose parallel reflections on the condition of art today converge in this presentation with elegant clarity. It offers not simply a meditation on past and present, but artfully takes on the issue of the “contemporary” in art as an elastic, almost indefinite category, where historical distinctions are often collapsed into a perpetual present. Barry X Ball’s practice insists on a different order of time: one grounded in duration, discipline, and the cumulative knowledge of making.

Barry X Ball, Pope Saint John Paul II, 2012-2024. Silver, 18K gold, 28-3/8 x 13-3/8 x 11-1/2 inches.

Barry X Ball, The Shape of Time
Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
9 May – 22 November 2026