Il Gardino Segreto, by Irene Cattaneo

6 May - 30 September 2026

To coincide with the 61st Biennale of Venice, Irene Cattaneo brings her surrealist and magical sculptures to the heart of Venice, transforming a Venetian private garden into a captivating, immersive experience.

Featuring new works by the artist, the garden functions as a contained, contemplative space — distinct from the surrounding city — where imagination and materiality converge in a dialogue between nature, sculpture, and dreamlike forms.

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The Garden as Interior

The installation is situated in a private garden in Venice, operating as a space of containment rather than exposure. In this context, the physical landscape and psychological interior are in continuous relation, shaped through one another.

Rooted in the intersection of emotion and literature, the installation builds on a previous body of work based on Baudelaire’s "Les Bienfaits de la Lune", which depicted the moon as a maternal force marking a transition into motherhood, while this current project shifts toward the entanglement of child and mother within lived perception.
Cinema, Memory

The project references the 1993 film "The Secret Garden", a work of personal significance and nostalgia, in dialogue with literary references and personal memory. Its themes of formative experience, the evolving relationship between child and adult, and the garden as a space of transformation inform the structure and perception of the installation.

An ode to nostalgia

Presented within the context of the Venice Biennale, the project engages with the musical association of minor keys—tonalities commonly used to evoke a sense of nostalgia and emotional recollection.

The work functions as an ode to this state of longing, representing a way back to oneself. By utilizing familiar forms and settings, the installation prompts a visceral recognition rather than a distant interpretation, inviting the viewer into the “minor key” of personal and literary memory.
The Central Axis: Effi Briest

Positioned at the center of the garden are swings, their scale and form relating to childhood objects. Cast in bronze, they introduce a material weight and permanence that contrasts with their usual associations of fleeting movement. This focal point references Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane, 1895), in particular the opening scene in which the protagonist appears as a young girl on a swing. In this image, the swing introduces a condition of suspension: Effi is in motion but not in control, positioned between the freedom of childhood and the social structures that will soon determine her life.

The swing further serves as a fundamental discourse on the duality of freedom and risk. This represents a difficult and constant balance linked to motherhood. It captures the fine line between the exhilaration of watching a child fly and the inherent danger of the fall. This precarious balance mirrors the child’s burgeoning autonomy and an internal negotiation, where every movement toward independence carries the weight of potential consequence.
The Landscape of Objects
By Irene Cattaneo
The installation is further articulated through a series of sculptural elements that populate this “interior” landscape:

Snowdrops
Light sculptures in glass and bronze serving as a deeply personal ode to my mother. Snowdrops (Galanthus) are the first heralds of spring, symbolizing new beginnings and hope as they push through frozen ground. Their elegant simplicity and resilience—blooming while winter still lingers—represent a quiet promise of renewal passed down through generations.
WELL, WELL, WELL

A stone sculpture crafted in solid stone and containing water, positioned in direct dialogue with the traditional Venetian well-head (vera da pozzo) found within the garden. Inside the well, illuminated text spells out the phrase WELL, WELL, WELL. On the surface, it plays with linguistic irony—an expression of surprise or sardonic recognition. However, within this architectural frame, the well becomes a site of literal and metaphorical illumination. This unexpected light disrupts the narrative of the “dark void,” suggesting that awareness emerges only when one dares to look inward and peer into the depths.
Fire-flies

Cast in bronze and sommerso red imbued glass. The name plays on “fireflies” and “time flies,” collapsing light and time into a linguistic slip common to childhood perception and cinematic imagination—where objects, words, and time are easily animated, misheard, and misread, taking on agency through perception. A play between name, function, and placement in relation to fire.

The Fire-flies and the Well are conceived as opposing and complementary forces: the well as depth, growth through darkness and inward reflection; the Fire-flies as lightness, play, and unstable perception.

Pareidola

Two tables imagined as an ode to one of my favorite childhood games: cloud-watching and interpretation. By highlighting the anagram of “cloud” as “could,” these pieces stand for the infinite feeling of possibility inherent to childhood.
Queen of the Night

A sculptural bench, table, and key set referencing flowers that bloom for only a single night, these works allude to the fleeting and incapturable nature of beauty and youth.

Utilizing lunar opaline glass, the set maintains a dialogue with the previous “lunar” body of work, illustrating a continuous evolution where one phase informs the next. The inclusion of the key introduces a symbolic dimension of secrecy—not as concealment, but as the formation of private, imaginative worlds fundamental to artistic creation.

It operates as a connection point between The Secret Garden and the Biennale’s thematic framework, evoking the tension between interiority and revelation.

The table setting pieces sourced by my mother and sister introduce an intimate domestic layer within the installation, extending the work into a lived, familial memory.

— Irene Cattaneo
About the Artist
Irene Cattaneo is a German-Italian artist (b. 1989) whose multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, functional pieces, wearable art, set design, and large scale installations. After relocating to Venice in 2021 to work with local artisans, she developed the Clouds and Coulds series, a foundation for her current sculptural explorations.

Her work is defined by crisp silhouettes, graphic concision, and the transformation of iconic symbols into functional objects, with a strong focus on glass, bronze, and stone. The phenomenology of glassmaking underpins her visual language, while literature, personal memory, and wordplay serve as conceptual threads.
Since her solo debut Yūgen during Venice Glass Week (2021), Cattaneo has exhibited widely in Italy and internationally. In 2024, she unveiled the site-specific Carpe(t) Diem at La Samaritaine / LVMH (Paris), followed by Just My Cup of Tea(r)s at Homo Faber (Venice), and Meteomorphosis at Lo Studio Nadja Romain during the Venice Art Biennale.

Her work has featured in multiple editions of Glasstress, alongside Ai Weiwei, Tony Cragg, and Erwin Wurm, most recently at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. She joined Meritalia editions with Gaetano Pesce and Misha Kahn, and her sculptures are included in the Dragon Hill Sculpture Park, designed by Jacques Coüelle, among artists like Antony Gormley and Gisela Colón.

In the U.S., her work gained recognition with a group show and auction at Dallas Contemporary, followed by her solo New York debut, Through the Looking Glass, an immersive installation in Ashlee Harrison’s Upper East Side salon. In 2025 she was selected to participate in Murano Illumina il Mondo, a project organised by Venice Glass Week and the City of Venice, where she exhibited her chandelier, The Observatory in the picturesque Piazza San Marco.

The same year in October, during Art Basel Paris, opened at Galerie Gastou her solo exhibition based on Charles Baudelaire prose poems Les Bienfaits de la Lune.