Painting in a Minor Key: What the Venice Biennale 2026 Tells Me About Where Taste Is Headed

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 10, 2026 | 6 MIN READ Painting in a Minor Key: What the Venice Biennale 2026 Tells Me About Where Taste Is Headed At a Glance The 61st Venice Biennale opened on May 9 with painting playing a quieter role than the headlines suggest, but a more important one. Look at what is actually on the walls of "In Minor Keys" and you can see institutional curation shifting toward slow, hand-made, often paper-based painting from artists with long careers. For collectors, this is the most useful signal of 2026 so far. There is a painting at the back of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini that stops most people. It is mural scale, vertical panels in delicate watercolor and ink and gouache, and what it shows is Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian curator who put together this entire exhibition and then died last May before she could see it open, standing beside the writer Toni Morrison. Magnolias weave between them. The painter is Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Cuban American, working in materials so light they look like they could lift off the wall. Both reviews I have read of the Biennale so far, one from The Art Newspaper and one from ArtReview, return to that painting. They disagree about almost everything else in the show. They agree on this. So before any conclusion gets drawn about In Minor Keys, about what it argues, where it lands politically, whether it succeeds, start there. Start with a painting in watercolor and ink, made on paper, hung mural-high, of two women. A complicated Biennale that became a quiet argument for painting This was always going to be a complicated Biennale. Kouoh was appointed in November 2024. By May 2025 she was gone, liver cancer, only days after the diagnosis. A team of five people she had been working with finalized the show with her in Dakar a month before she died. Ben Luke at The Art Newspaper put the scope plainly: “At the press conference in February, they announced the full concept, with a list of 111 invited individual artists, duos and collectives, and—a key factor—artist-led organisations.” The official Biennale page lists 110 invited participants plus seven artist-centered institutions running through the show. What Kouoh wanted was an exhibition that would, in her own words, shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys. Her team described the curatorial gesture as listening rather than speaking for, and the experience as more sensory than didactic. None of that, on paper, sounds like a thesis about painting. It sounds like a thesis about quietness. But what gets foregrounded under that thesis is, very specifically, painters. Lubaina Himid’s British Pavilion is filled with large, surreal, boldly coloured paintings. The Brazilian Pavilion gives Adriana Varejão wall reliefs and murals. The Congolese Pavilion features Géraldine Tobe’s smoke paintings, made with a kerosene lamp, alongside other artists working with fire as a material. The Estonian Pavilion is Merike Estna painting in public v