Luc Tuymans: La Pelle documents the most ambitious monographic exhibition of the work of Luc Tuymans (born 1958). The Pinault Collection at Palazzo Grassi has in the past mounted exhibitions of the work of Sigmar Polke, Damien Hirst and Urs Fischer in its elegant interiors along the Grand Canal in Venice. It was thus the appropriate venue for this survey of Luc Tuymans' work. Quiet, restrained and at times unsettling, his works engage with questions of history and its representation and with everyday subject matter in an unfamiliar and eerie light. Painted from preexisting imagery, they often appear slightly out-of-focus and sparsely colored, like third-degree abstractions from reality. Whereas earlier works were based on magazine pictures, drawings, television footage and Polaroids, recent source images include material accessed online and the artist's own iPhone photos, printed out and sometimes rephotographed several times.

Swiss photographer Rene Burri (1933-2014) has been wherever history had been played out. A member of the famous Magnum Photos cooperative since 1955, he photographed in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, recording the Six-Days and Yom Kippur Wars, as well as the Vietnam War during the 1960s. His many travels took him to Japan and China, across Europe and the Americas to report sharply many of the 20th century's major events. His extraordinary sense for people and their personalities helped him create portraits of celebrities such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Luis Barragan; or artists Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Tinguely. His iconic picture of Che Guevara with cigar, shot in 1963, is one of the world's most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits ever. Burri had a close relationship with Lausanne's Musee de l' Elysee and in 1987 the museum staged a first exhibition of his work, entitled The Ruins of the Future, followed by his first major retrospective in 2004. The museum also hosts the Fondation Rene Burri, which the artist established in 2013 as a home for his estate. Published to coincide with a new exhibition at Musee de l'Elysee in spring 2020, Rene Burri: An Eye Explosion draws from this vast collection. It brings together for the first time Burri's entire body of work, photographic and non-photographic. Black-and-white and colour photographs feature alongside previously unpublished archival documents as well as book designs, exhibition projects, travel diaries, collages, watercolours, and other multiple objects he collected. It offers a new, multi-faceted and uniquely intimate view of one of the world's greatest photo reporters.