Venice, January 23, 2017 - A record number of visitors came to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in 2016, reaching for the first time since its opening in 1980 413,499 during the museum’s 315 open days, with a daily average of 1,313. An additional 8,495 guests visited the collection during exhibition openings, special visits, and institutional and private events.

The retrospective dedicated to Tancredi Parmeggiani, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, continues until March 13. It has had enthusiastic success both with critics and with the general public. La Lettura-Corriere della Sera wrote “Tancredi, a whole art to discover,” a sentiment echoed by the Financial Times which defined the artist from Feltre as “the artist from the floating world”, and La Repubblica, which wrote in Robinson of the “lyrical Tancredi.” Since its opening on November 12 the exhibition has drawn over 65,000 visitors.

In 2017, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni hosts a rich exhibition program. Four exhibitions span the Surrealist art of the Danish painter Rita Kernn-Larsen, the abstract imagery of the American painter Mark Tobey, and then proceeds to the beach in Picasso's work around 1937, concluding with the Parisian mystical Symbolism of the Salon de la Rose+Croix. The projects of the fifth edition of Kids Creative Lab also have their space in the program. These exhibitions will occupy both the museum’s traditional temporary exhibition galleries and two new spaces, the so-called “Project Rooms.” The latter will host small, highly-focused projects that deepen our knowledge of a single artist, a masterpiece, or a specific theme related to the twentieth century art of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The Project Rooms will be inaugurated by Rita Kernn-Larsen. Surrealist Paintings, curated by Gražina Subelytė, February 25 to June 26. This brings together works by an artist little known outside Denmark, to whom Peggy Guggenheim gave a solo exhibition in 1938 at her London gallery Guggenheim Jeune.

From March 30 to April 17 the work of creative children will fill the exhibition galleries: the climax of the fifth edition of Kids Creative Lab will be the presentation of the projects of primary schools who have participated in this highly successful educational program which is jointly promoted by OVS and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and which has seen the participation of millions of schoolchildren from all over Italy. The themes of Kids Creative Lab in 2016-17 are sustainability, ecology, and respect for the environment. Kids Creative Lab is working with Lucy + Jorge Orta, internationally known artists who, together with the Education Department of the museum, have designed and organized the creative workshop “SostenART,” which will form part of the museum’s Kids Creative Lab presentation.

From May 6 until September 10, the museum features Mark Tobey: Threading Light, curated by Debra Bricker Balken. Organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, this is the largest retrospective of American painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976) in over forty years, with more than sixty works on view. The show reveals the development of this very singular and original abstract painter, whose work was strongly influenced by East Asian art. It includes two paintings from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s collections: Trembling Space (1961, the Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection) and Advance of History (1964, Peggy Guggenheim Collection).

Late summer the Project Rooms will host Picasso on the Beach, an exhibition conceived by Luca Massimo Barbero. Based on a collaboration with the Musée Picasso in Paris, this gathers a selection of drawings and paintings of figures on the seashore, which Picasso painted or drew, between February and December 1937.

From October 28 to January 7, 2018, the museum celebrates Symbolism and its protagonists with Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892-1897, curated by Vivien Greene. This will be the first-ever museum exhibition focused on the Salon de la Rose+Croix, the invention of the eccentric critic and writer Josephine Péladan (1859-1918), founder of a Rosicrucian order. The salons brought together artists of the Symbolist movement, including Antoine Bourdelle, Jean Delville, Henri Martin, Armand Point, Georges Rouault, Carlos Schwabe, Alexander Séon, Jan Toorop, Ville Vallgren, and Félix Vallotton. The exhibition is structured according to themes, such as the role of Orpheus, reverence for the Quattrocento Italian masters, and the dualism of the femme fragile and the femme fatale, underscoring the different, and sometimes contradictory concepts that characterized Symbolism in the 1890s.

This year rich in exhibitions is also the 25th birthday of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s association of the Guggenheim Intrapresæ. Founded in 1992 as a corporate membership, the group has in all these years sustained its enthusiastic involvement in all the activities of the Collection, from temporary exhibitions to special projects and the expansion of the museum’s premises.

In conclusion, with more than 217,000 followers, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection is among the most “social” museums in Italy, growing by 80% since last year: with more than 120,000 Facebook fans, 12,000 Twitter followers, and 85,000 Instagram followers, the Collection tells its story on social media and interacts with its “friends.” With these numbers, we hope our digital community will continue to follow us and to grow in number, and we of course await their visits to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni to share the art and beauty with which Peggy Guggenheim surrounded herself.