Museums of Tears extends Francesco Vezzoli's 2024 exhibition at Museo Correr, Venice, combining historical works and new commissions to explore antiquity, emotion and illusion. Conceived as an artist's book rather than a catalogue, it transforms the museum guide into a hybrid archive and portable museum of memory, beauty and mourning.
Conceived as both a publication and an autonomous artwork, Museums of Tears extends Francesco Vezzoli's acclaimed exhibition presented at Museo Correr, Venice, in 2024, in the form of a true artist's book.
Developed in dialogue with Donatien Grau, the project brought together historical works from the museum alongside recent and newly commissioned works by Vezzoli, creating a layered conversation between antiquity, emotion and illusion. The exhibition marked a significant moment in the artist's practice, reflecting his growing engagement with art history, archaeology and the museum as a space where the past can be reimagined through contemporary desire.
Moving beyond the conventional exhibition catalogue format, the volume has been conceived as a true artist's book. Inspired by the historical guidebooks of Museo Correr and by Carlo Scarpa's vision of the museum as a form of emotional choreography, it transforms the museum guide into a hybrid object: part scholarly document, part fictional archive and part personal diary. Rather than documenting the exhibition, Museum of Tears becomes an extension of it: a portable museum of memory, beauty, mourning and artifice.
Francesco Vezzoli (born 1971, Brescia, Italy, lives and works in Milan) explores power of contemporary popular culture. By closely emulating formats of various media, such as advertising and film, he addresses ongoing preoccupations with the fundamental ambiguity of truth, the seductive power of language, and the instability of the human persona. These include a trailer for a remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula (2005), starring Vidal himself, Helen Mirren, and Courtney Love; an advertising campaign directed by Roman Polanski for Greed, a fictitious perfume; and elaborate, site-specific performances inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Pirandello, and Salvador Dalí that have featured superstars like Catherine Deneuve, Cate Blanchett, and Lady Gaga. Though Vezzoli employs a diverse and varying array of media, needlepoint has remained a signature technique from the outset of his career. Initially emulating famous actors who practiced needlepoint on and off-screen—from Vicente Minelli to Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, and Greta Garbo—as time went on, it became a more profound and contemplative activity which he referred to as a world of feelings, crises, obsessions and depressions historically unified with the craft.
