Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia
IVÁN TOVAR: LE RETOUR
Fundación Iván Tovar announces Iván Tovar: Le Retour, a Collateral Event of the 61st Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné
Fundación Iván Tovar presents Iván Tovar: Le Retour, an exhibition celebrating the sparkling oeuvre of Iván Tovar (1942 – 2020), an essential Caribbean artist whose creative impact is only just beginning to be felt among contemporary global audiences. Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, the exhibition has been conceived for the historic Ex Istituto Idrografico at the Museo Storico Navale, Venice’s renowned maritime institution located in the Castello district.
Iván Tovar: Le Retour positions the artist’s transatlantic trajectory—formative years in the Dominican Republic, two decades working in Paris, and an eventual return home—as central to the global history of Surrealism. This reapproach comes in the wake of the centenary of André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto,” which museums across Europe, Latin America and the U.S. have celebrated to reprise the story of modern and contemporary art. The details of these retellings—that is, the alternative histories they encompass, which invariably involve other influences, other artists and cultural agents, as well as other audiences—reshape the history of painting in the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean and beyond. The particulars of Tovar’s expanded narratives, along with the capacious stories animating Koyo Kouoh’s 61st International Art Exhibition In Minor Keys, stack up not just as tales from an underacknowledged past, they propose possible futures.
“Be in permanent readiness for the marvelous,” the Martinican Surrealist and writer Suzanne Césaire counseled. That very search for marvels encapsulates Tovar’s art. From the 1960s until his death in 2020, Tovar fashioned an important body of two-and three-dimensional artworks—“machines for longing” rendered luminously in “the colors of dreams”—that synthesize Dominican hues, motifs, and inventiveness, together with the stylings of mid-twentieth century European art. The group of paintings and sculptures that enliven Iván Tovar: Le Retour represents both the artist’s emergence on a global stage, as well as the global possibilities of Surrealism—that most internationalist of European movements.
Much more than a Latin American précis of Surrealism, Iván Tovar’s work articulates global ideas, symbols, and visual phenomena anew, fomenting divergent ways of seeing that promote a cultural position that has historically been considered subaltern and exotic but that, in fact, remains privileged.
About Iván Tovar
Iván Tovar was born in 1942 in San Francisco de Macorís, Dominican Republic, and died in 2020 in Santo Domingo. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes before traveling to Paris in 1963 on a painting scholarship, where he lived for two decades. He participated in the 36st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 1972 and showed in major museums including Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. In 2018, Tovar received the National Prize for Visual Arts from the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic. Major retrospectives of his work were held at the Museo-Fundación Eugenio Granell in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2014), and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo (2023).
About the Venue
The Ex Istituto Idrografico is located within the Museo Storico Navale, Venice’s renowned naval history museum situated in the Castello district near the Arsenale. Founded in 1919, the museum is housed in a historic 15th-century building. The Ex Istituto Idrografico occupies the ground floor and comprises three exhibition spaces.
About Fundación Iván Tovar
The Fundación Iván Tovar was established in 2021 as a non-profit cultural and educational organization. The foundation’s mission is to preserve, promote, disseminate, and develop the art and culture of the Dominican Republic, with special attention to the life and work of Iván Tovar. Since its founding, the foundation has organized major exhibitions including “Tovar: Surrealismo Vivo” (2022), an immersive exhibition that attracted over 75,000 visitors at Plaza de España in Santo Domingo, and “Tovar Retrospectivo” (2023) at the Museo de Arte Moderno, presenting over 200 works spanning the artist’s career.
Visitor Information
Iván Tovar: Le Retour
Ex Istituto Idrografico – Museo Storico Navale
Castello 2148
30122 Venezia
Exhibition Dates: May 9 – November 22, 2026
www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026
ivantovar.org
Press Contact
Hunter Braithwaite
hunter@braithwaite.llc
Credits
General Production: Fundación Iván Tovar
Lead Patron: Héctor José Rizek Sued
Executive Manager: Daniela Tovar Castillo
Curator and Cultural Project Manager: Christian Viveros-Fauné
Exhibition Designer: Raúl Morilla
Project Coordinator: Olga Alba
Advisors: María Castillo, Yuri Ruiz, Walter Otero
Researcher: Lilian Carrasco
Art Cataloguer: Simona Cappelli
Graphic Designer: Olga Valdez
Production Management: CS Art Management – Carlotta Scarpa
Caption and Courtesy Information
Iván Tovar, La chaise adulte, 1969, oil on canvas, 90 x 71 cm. Juan Manuel Portela Bisonó Collection, © Photo Courtesy Fundación Iván Tovar.
