Barry X Ball’s Wild Sculptures Are Perfectly at Home at Venice’s Grand Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore

When Carmelo Grasso, director and curator at the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, saw New York–based artist Barry X Ball’s sculpture Pope Saint John Paul II (2012–24), he knew he wanted to mount a show at the sublime church where he works. The resulting exhibition, “The Shape of Time,” organized by curator Bob Nickas, includes 23 pieces, many shown publicly for the first time, and is centered on this incredibly elaborate work, depicting the pontiff who became a global celebrity in the 1970s and ’80s. It stands in the choir, where its brilliant metals are offset by the dark, carved wood of the benches.

Though it measures just over two feet high, Pope Saint John Paul II commands your attention with richly filigreed silver and 18 karat gold, crafted into a riveting vision of the pontiff that echoes reliquaries; hidden inside it are numerous narrative flourishes. Cast in collaboration with Italian jewelry house Damiani and twelve years in the making, it depicts a Polish pope (the rare non-Italian pontiff) whose level of fame makes today’s head of the Catholic Church look a bit obscure by comparison. 

“John Paul was part of the Solidarity movement, a playwright, and into soccer and skiing,” Ball noted during a walkthrough of the show on Tuesday. “Not your typical idea of a pope.” Tucked away in the elaborate sculpture are renditions of John Paul’s nemeses—Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin—as well as biographical details, like a pair of skis as well as a bullet, a reference to the 1981 attempt on his life by Turkish hit man Mehmet Ali Ağca. Ball noted with some satisfaction that the pontiff later visited his would-be assassin in his cell and forgave him. He also pointed out references to the three Abrahamic religions, alluding to John Paul’s visits on a trip to Jerusalem to the spiritual homes of all three religions.

Designed by Andrea Palladio and completed in 1610, San Giorgio Maggiore is one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, its white marble facade towering over the lagoon opposite the Piazzetta di San Marco. The richly decorated interior provides the perfect display for Ball’s lush and elaborate works in mediums like Belgian and Vietnamese marbles and Iranian onyx. The nonprofit branch of the Benedictine community housed at San Giorgio Maggiore considers hospitality and the organizing of contemporary art exhibitions to be integral to its institutional mission. While religious bodies have a long history of commissioning the leading artists of their times, that connection has weakened over the last century or so, in the Benedictines’ view. To revive the tradition, they have brought globally known artists to show there, including Berlinde de Bruyckere, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, Luc Tuymans, and Ai Weiwei.

The study of such histories help inform Ball’s work overall, which engages closely with many artistic precedents. Monumental sculptures from the artist’s “Masterpieces” series appear in the church’s sublime nave and transept, including Pietà (2011–22), which is inspired by Michelangelo’s unfinished Pietà Rondanini (1552–53). Ball has created an adaptation of it in translucent golden-white Iranian onyx. “Michelangelo was working on it in the days before he died,” Ball said, “basically creating his own funerary monument.” Art historian Leo Steinberg interpreted the mysterious piece, long ignored and nearly forgotten, as showing Christ actually carrying his own mother in her grief, Ball noted, pointing out that he himself changed the face of Christ into that of Michelangelo. 

Also in the transept is the towering Saint Bartholomew Flayed (2011–20), inspired by a 16th-century piece by the Lombard sculptor Marco d’Agrate that resides in Milan’s Duomo and depicts the martyred saint wearing his own skin wrapped around his torso. (Ball noted with a chuckle that when he first saw the original piece, he thought that the man was wearing a toga.) Fittingly for its gory subject matter, Ball made his version in what he called a “bloody” French Rouge du Roi marble. 

With his riffs on art history, Ball says, “I’m not talking about mechanical reproduction. I’m trying to get into the soul of the pieces I’m working with.” His attempt to get at the soul involve some very high-tech processes, though; an enormous robot in his studio had run 24/7 for about seven weeks in order to do the milling for one piece in particular. That kind of assist has earned him some detractors. “Look at the comments on Instagram,” he said wryly during a recent studio visit, “and I’m the death of art.”

Born in Pasadena in 1955 and raised in a fundamentalist Christian household, Ball works out of an impressive home/studio complex in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he employs about fifteen artists full-time. Though he uses sophisticated computer programs and 3D scanning and printing, the pieces are always finished with extensive handwork, totaling thousands of hours of labor on each piece.

Though Ball has a scant auction record—with only 13 pieces coming to the block per the Artnet Price Database, all since 2017—his works have scored high prices, topping out at $545,000, paid for Sleeping Hermaphrodite (2008–10) at Christie’s New York in 2016. Four other pieces have sold for six-figure sums, all since 2018. In about the same span, the artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions internationally, including at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, and in group exhibitions at venues such as New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. His work resides in institutional collections including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, and the Panza Collection in Switzerland. 

Ball’s work has also earned raves from critics. The New Yorker, in 2009, compared his riffs on art history to contemporary reboots of classic literature, saying, “he turns a refined masterpiece freaky.” In 2025, Pulitzer Prize winner Sebastian Smee, writing for the Washington Post, said that a sculpture of the Buddha “is the manifestation of an idea of art that’s both dazzlingly new and profoundly ancient.”

At San Giorgio Maggiore, three stone renditions of the Buddha appear in the sacristy, arranged in the form of a cross. Mirrored Buddha Herms (2018–23) incorporates a fifteenth-century Japanese lacquered and gilded wood Buddha, which sits facing one of Ball’s own pieces, executed in Belgian black marble. Echoing the way that Pope John Paul’s ecumenicism attracted Ball, the artist gratefully noted that this is the first time a Buddha has appeared on the church’s grounds. Sited in front of an existing painting, Buddha (2018-25) seamlessly combines golden honeycomb calcite, wounded Mexican (Baja) onyx, more of that French Rouge de Roi marble, and translucent pink Iranian onyx, sitting on a base of white Vietnamese marble. 

Venice served as a historical crossroads between East and West. It is hard not to see Ball’s works uniting stones from various parts of the world (including stone from Iran, currently suffering under US assault) as a welcome gesture by an artist, one who broke away from his own narrow upbringing, toward the same ecumenicism practiced by John Paul, the progressive pope whose strange portrait inspired this impressive show. 

“Barry X Ball – The Shape of Time” is on view at the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore 2, 30124, May 9–November 22, 2026.