VENICE, ITALY.-The 51st International Art Exhibition, organized by the Fondazione la Biennale di Venezia and directed by María de Corral and by Rosa Martínez, opened to the public on June 12, 2005. The 2005 edition of the oldest and most famous exhibition of contemporary art presented several important innovations: first and foremost the beginning of a new cycle that will initiate a creative dialogue with the Artistic Direction by setting new objectives and confirming the central role of the Biennale in the international cultural and artistic debate. After almost five months, the 51st edition of Venice Biennale closed its doors wit an average of almost 1,700 visitors each day.

For the first time in the history of its 110 years of activity the direction has been entrusted to two Directors, María de Corral and Rosa Martínez - art historians, critics and independent curators from Spain -, and the exhibition will be composed of two specific and complementary shows that will offer an articulated yet homogeneous reading of international contemporary art from the Seventies through today, with an eye to the near future. The two exhibition projects - The Experience of Art and Always a Little Further conceived respectively by María de Corral and by Rosa Martínez - will present, from different points of view, the best of contemporary art through a rigorous selection of artists, invited in a limited number and each represented by a series of works that document their creative history, to demonstrate the variety of artistic languages and aesthetic trends. The works on display will mostly be new or made in situ, and will be installed so that they dialogue with the extraordinary spaces of the exhibition in order to offer two levels of interpretation, as research for experts in the field, and as impact for the visitors.

The Experience of Art, curated by María de Corral, is hosted in the 34 rooms of the Italian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale and presents forty-two international artists, famous or promising, within an itinerary made up of a significant number of paintings, videos and installations, most of them created especially for the Biennale, which represent the trends in the development of various languages since 1970, considered as the point of departure for the itinerary, until today. The exhibition was conceived by María de Corral to be "more similar to a centre for experimentation than a stack of certainties", to deal with intensity, not categories, and to rediscover the emotion of art.