Return | Ritorno is an exhibition of new large-scale works by artist and poet Arch Hades, unfolding across three floors of the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, a decommissioned church on the Grand Canal in Venice.
The signature precision and composure of Arch Hades’ work is central to Return | Ritorno, a creatively ambitious exhibition where site-specific painting, immersive sculpture and an installation soundscape meet, resulting in a glimpse into the artist’s ethereal interior world. Hades is part philosopher, part painter and her ability to veer with such agility between art and literature demonstrates both vulnerability and restraint. Hades’ debut Venice Biennale solo exhibition is an important step on her journey of exploring the human psyche through words and visuals.
Hades is influenced by Classical, Surrealist and Romantic traditions, and her Venice Biennale show expands on themes running through her critically-acclaimed London solo show, which opened during Frieze Week in October 2025. The London exhibition titled We Are All Just Passing Through featured paintings, sculpture and installation crossing the divide between the spoken word and visual art to create synesthetic experiences.
The centrepiece of Hades’ Venice exhibition lends the exhibition its title Return (2025), and is a monumental 22-panel painting spanning 13 metres. Comprising sixty-three life-size figures, the work pays homage to the power and precision of Greco-Roman sculpture. Installed across three walls on the building’s top floor, the painting echoes the structure of an altar triptych and draws inspirationfrom Gustav Klimt’s Faculty Paintings – Medicine, Philosophy and Jurisprudence (1900–1907).
Like Klimt’s allegorical masterpiece in which the human form is rendered within a collective river of life, Hades traces a spectrum of human experience, positioning figures in varied emotive states – at once solitary yet merging into one another as they are beckoned towards an abyss at the centre of the composition.
Sphinx (2026) – an immersive sculptural installation rendered in mirrored chrome – simultaneously evokes ancient Egyptian ruins and otherworldly futures. New works from Hades’ Confessions series (2025 – ongoing) draw on decades of journaling that began in early childhood. Here, the artist extracts single lines from discarded handwritten diaries and enlarges them onto slabs resembling materials such as concrete and marble.
By making one’s thoughts and feelings public, we can consolidate shared experiences and feel less isolated.” By magnifying these intimate personal musings into delicately composed artworks, she explores the act of making the private public and, for the first time in her practice, positions text at the centre of the art work – probing the tensions between confession, memory and material permanence.”
Arch Hades
Arch Hades, Return | Ritorno is at the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia from 7 May until,. November 2026. Supported by Erarta Foundation
