At Venice’s Bubble Space, Noemi Priolo’s hybrid sculptures inhabit an apartment overlooking the lagoon, bringing the unfamiliar into intimate proximity.
A wild thistle is an unlikely starting point for a Venetian drawing room. Yet its tension between flower and spine, invitation and defence, gives Noemi Priolo’s Erbaluce its force. At Bubble Space, an apartment above the Lineadombra restaurant in Dorsoduro, the Sicilian artist introduces a species that belongs to no established natural order. Aluminium, glass and volcanic stone form a sculptural organism poised between growth and invention.
Curated by Vincenzo Alessandria, the exhibition unfolds in rooms overlooking the lagoon. Natural light enters an inhabited setting, giving the encounter with sculpture a domestic scale. Here, a visitor can linger, return to a detail or sit with an unresolved impression. The works share the room with us, close enough for their strangeness to become a form of company.
A plant at the threshold
The central installation, Erbaluce, takes its inspiration from the wild thistles of Mediterranean landscapes. An aluminium stem supports leaves, thorns and glass flowers above a ground of volcanic stone. The materials hold different associations: industrial metal, fragile glass, rock formed through intense heat. Together, they suggest a plant whose evolution has taken an unfamiliar turn.
Its flowers resemble hands joined in prayer. This almost human gesture interrupts our reading of the sculpture as vegetation, introducing the possibility of devotion, appeal or shelter. The thorns complicate that tenderness. What appears vulnerable also possesses the means to defend itself.
Priolo’s imagined species invites us to reconsider the distinctions through which we recognise life. Botanical, bodily and manufactured forms overlap; familiarity draws us closer before uncertainty unsettles the encounter.
Around it, Amor Mundi brings together nine sculptures with glossy, hybrid forms. Their title, “love of the world”, opens a question that extends through the exhibition: how do we relate to forms of existence that resist our categories? In 965, growth proceeds through the accumulation and multiplication of small elements. Across these works, transformation emerges as a persistent condition, with each form appearing capable of becoming something else.
Sicily as an inner landscape
Born in Palermo in 1990, Priolo trained in sculpture at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts before spending five years in England, from 2016 to 2021. She now lives and works between Padua and Venice and is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Sicily remains an imaginative source: an inner landscape of ancestral memory and primal tensions. Across her practice, resin, fur, feathers and found objects become the surfaces and traces of creatures suspended between animal, plant and human. Attraction and unease coexist. The human figure loses its privileged position within a larger cycle of mutation.
Priolo closely oversees the making of her sculptures, maintaining a physical relationship with materials and process. That proximity matters in works whose presence depends on the meeting of textures, the ambiguity of a surface and the suggestion that something inert might be alive.
Time to stay
Bubble Space allows this encounter to unfold without haste. Through its collaboration with Lineadombra, visitors can request coffee, wine or an aperitivo served within the exhibition rooms. Conversation and contemplation occupy the same space.
Beyond the windows lies the lagoon; inside, Priolo’s invented organisms establish their own quiet territory. The pleasure of the setting draws us in. The sculptures ask us to remain attentive to what we cannot immediately name.
by Alexandra I. Mas
ERBALUCE — Noemi Priolo
Curated by Vincenzo Alessandria
Bubble Space, Dorsoduro 19, Venice
Until 22 November 2026
Daily, 11am–9.30pm. Admission free.
Appointments are recommended, particularly for the opportunity to meet the artist. Walk-in access is through Lineadombra restaurant.
