AQUAE Melissa McGill - Until June 20, 2026
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10 & zero uno in Venice is pleased to present, from April 30 to June 20, 2026, AQUAE, a solo
exhibition by Melissa McGill, created in collaboration with Mazzoleni.
Starting from a deep and specific relationship with the Venetian context, AQUAE brings
together a core of works that develops the artist’s research around water as a medium, a living presence, and a means of storytelling.
The title—the Latin plural of “acque”—immediately evokes a material that is never univocal, but mobile, layered, and multiple. In Melissa McGill’s practice, water is not just an element, but an interlocutor with which to engage in dialogue, an element from which to draw knowledge and with which to act synchronously. It is both a physical and symbolic presence, capable of bringing to the surface the tensions that permeate a territory, its ecological fragilities, its collective energies, and its possibilities for resistance. In this sense, Venice, a quintessential city of water and now emblematically exposed to the pressures of climate change and mass tourism, offers itself as a place for listening and giving back. For McGill, who lived in Venice in the early 1990s and has returned regularly since, Venice is also a space for enduring relationships: a community with which her work has been built over time through proximity, exchange, and shared commitment to the lagoon. Taken together, the works brought together in AQUAE thus outline a coherent path around water as a relational, ecological, and imaginative material.
The exhibition features Red Regatta (Coppa del Presidente della Repubblica, Bacino San Marco), which evokes one of the most emblematic moments of Red Regatta, the independent public project McGill presented in 2019 in the Venetian lagoon in collaboration with the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia*. The work retains the visual and symbolic power of that project, which activated the lagoon with 52 traditional sailboats with hand-painted red sails, involving over 250 Venetians.
In this artwork, red expands as an ambiguous and intense signal: the color of life, passion, energy, and belonging, but also of alarm and urgency. It reflects Venice itself—its bricks, its terracotta roofs, its mercantile history, its pictorial tradition—and at the same time makes visible a collective tension, contrasting with the colors of the lagoon water that resurface in the other works on display.
This same attention to water as an active partner, bearer of memory and its own voice, also runs through the works from the Eridanus series, here represented with Oceanids (Laguna di Venezia), Delta I, and Delta II. In these works, McGill intervenes on printed maps of the Venice Lagoon and the Po Delta, Italy’s largest wetland system, where the Po River flows into the Adriatic just south of the Venetian lagoon. Cartography here becomes the starting point for a transformation that is both visual and conceptual: the technical lines, boundaries, names, and measurements that structure the scientific representation of the territory are overlaid with fluid currents of natural color, created through a combination of water and organic materials such as indigo, chlorophyllin, copper oxide, and homemade soy milk. The result is a surface where the map no longer simply describes the landscape, but enters into dialogue with it, allowing what representation normally fails to capture to
emerge: the vitality of the waterway, its ancestral dimension, the possibility of imagining a different way of orienting oneself in the present, following water not as a resource to be dominated, but as a guide.
If Red Regatta conveys the spirit of a collective gesture and Eridanus opens a reflection on the ways of reading and transcribing the territory, the Lagoon Watercolor Studies series convey a more intimate, direct, and processual dimension of McGill’s research. These new watercolors were created using water drawn from the Venice Lagoon, which was invited to physically enter the work as a collaborator. In them, water is not simply depicted, but participates in the construction of the image, becoming an active medium through which to record the motion of the wind, the rhythm of the waves, the sedimentation of time, the atmospheric vibration of the landscape. In keeping with the rest of the exhibition, here too the lagoon appears not as a backdrop, but as a living presence, capable of influencing the very language of the work. The colors seem to capture and reflect the aquatic hues of the city, its reflections, its shifting light, making painting a place of contact between
observation and immersion.
Concurrently with the exhibition, the artist will present Marea, a participatory public art project promoted by the Water Projects Association, in collaboration with the residents of Corte Nova in the Castello district, from April 30 to May 10. The project has received the support of the Municipality of Venice–Murano–Burano and the patronage of the Italian National Commission for UNESCO for its cultural value, as well as the support of the Italian Embassy in the United States.
BIO
Melissa McGill is known for collaborative, ambitious public art projects, creative interventions and a vibrant studio practice. Her projects are site-specific, immersive experiences that explore nuanced conversations between land, water, sustainable traditions, and the interconnectedness of all living beings. At the heart of her work is a focus on community, meaningful shared experiences and lasting positive impact. Spanning a variety of media including performance, photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, light, video and immersive installation, McGill has presented both independent projects and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally since 1991. Melissa McGill is the recipient of The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency (2026) and is a National
Endowment of the Arts ArtWorks Grant recipient.
