HYBRIDS, Leandro Erlich at Negozio Olivetti – Photography is by Luca Chiaudano, ©FAI 2026.

Art, Architecture. Carlo Scarpa’s Negozio Olivetti has always felt less like a shop and more like an argument for what architecture can be — all raw concrete, warm timber and filtered Venetian light. This Biennale season, it meets its match. Leandro Erlich’s Hybrids arrives here not as a guest but as a conversation partner: butterflies with ear-shaped wings, corals that read like miniature metropolises, a brain mapped with the architecture of its own thoughts. The building and the work seem, quite naturally, to deserve each other.

• RELATED STORIES: Read more about Venice Art Biennale on Archipanic.

Presented by Associazione Arte Continua and organised by FAI in collaboration with Galleria Continua — with curatorial direction by Marcello Dantas — Hybrids runs at St Mark’s Square through 22 November, as part of the 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

The fil rouge is the charged boundary between the man-made and the natural. Suspended before the staircase, Pulled by the Roots makes visible an uprooting that is both physical and conceptual. Quartz, meanwhile, folds crystal formation into architectural form, the mineral and the built collapsing into one another with quiet precision.

The Cloud – Bell, in extra-clear glass with digital ceramic printing and set within a wengé wood case, turns something as weightless as a cloud into a physical, architectural proposition. Concrete Coral pits industrial material against organic form, and Maison Fond, in Carrara marble, imagines an architecture caught in the act of dissolution — the idea of shelter, quietly coming undone. La Carte (steel, resin and light) introduces a cartographic dimension to the space — a geography that feels shifting and unresolved, as if the map itself refuses to settle.

“Hybrids articulates its narrative around a compound that does not aspire to purity, but emerges from the encounter – sometimes harmonious, sometimes unsettling – between distinct entities, where each form preserves its memory while becoming something else,” says Erlich. The sculptures — some never exhibited before — include architectural cabbages, trees growing on human feet, and forms that hover between the biological and the built.

What Hybrids ultimately proposes is an ecosystem in perpetual adjustment: irony and play folded into nature, culture, architecture, and the body, converging into something restless and alive. The exhibition is part of the Arte Continua Association’s ongoing commitment to fostering meaningful exchange between art and architecture — and within Scarpa’s walls, that exchange feels anything but theoretical. 

Photography is by Luca Chiaudiano, ©FAI 2026.