VENICE.- Two American painters with very different approaches to abstraction will take over neighboring spaces at Castello 925 this fall, offering visitors a pair of exhibitions that move between memory, color, geometry and the physical experience of painting.
Opening during the same week and running from September 24 through November 22, 2026, Joe Diggs: In Venice and Whitney Hagen: Chromatic Conditions form part of Castello 925's program alongside the 61st Venice Biennale. Both exhibitions respond, in their own ways, to the Biennale's theme, In Minor Keys. An opening reception for the shows is scheduled for Saturday, September 26.
The similarities largely end there.
For Joe Diggs, abstraction emerges from memory, family history and the textures of everyday life. The Cape Cod-based artist has long been known for figurative paintings rooted in his family and the African American community, but the Venice exhibition reveals another side of his practice: a world of color, pattern and layered forms that suggest woven surfaces and accumulated experience.
Diggs' paintings can move easily between the personal and the expansive. Some are large and densely worked; others are deliberately modest, painted on such ordinary objects as fast-food containers. Poker scores and handwritten "notes to self" appear among the marks, transforming materials that might otherwise be discarded into records of lived time. The exhibition describes these abstractions as carrying a kind of spiritual memory of traditional woven surfaces.
That willingness to move between formats is characteristic of an artist whose work has never remained within a single visual language. Diggs has made figurative paintings dealing with African American history and personal family memories, gestural plein-air landscapes and geometric abstractions. His work can range from wall-sized murals to intimate pieces on cardboard.
Works reproduced with the exhibition materials underline that range. The Past (2024) is crowded with repeated patterns, circular motifs and woven-looking passages in bright yellows, reds and greens, while an Untitled painting from 2025 brings together overlapping elliptical and linear forms against fields of saturated color. Other works push toward more gestural territory, demonstrating just how difficult it is to reduce Diggs' practice to a single style.
The artist and critic Seph Rodney has described that variety through a cosmic metaphor, suggesting that any single Diggs painting represents only one part of a much larger visual universe.
Diggs has generational roots on Cape Cod, where his work remains closely connected to local history and community. Recent solo exhibitions have included the Provincetown Art Association & Museum and Berta Walker Gallery in 2025, Holderness School in New Hampshire the same year, and earlier presentations at the Brattleboro Museum and Cotuit Center for the Arts. In 2025, the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod named him Artist of the Year. He is represented by Berta Walker Gallery.
A short distance away, in Castello 925's gallery annex, Whitney Hagen approaches abstraction from a different direction.
In Chromatic Conditions, flat planes of color become architectural tools. Painted on wood panels, Hagen's compositions use sharply defined blocks, angles and unexpected color relationships to create spaces that seem to fold, tilt and open beyond the surface. The gallery describes the paintings as "21st-century icons" that glow like prisms and construct the framework of an unseen geometry.
The images accompanying the exhibition release make the contrast with Diggs especially clear. In Hagen's Signs of Light (2026), pastel pinks, blues, oranges and greens come together in an arrangement that feels simultaneously architectural and weightless. A-Frame (2025) pushes bright geometric planes into a tighter, more dramatic spatial construction, while Red Impact (2026) sets a concentrated explosion of color against a dark ground.
Despite their apparent precision, Hagen's paintings are not simply exercises in formal geometry. Their shifts in scale and perspective make the spaces unstable. What first appears to be a flat arrangement can suddenly read as an interior, a structure or an impossible architectural fragment. Color is what holds those competing impressions together.
The Venice presentation marks an important milestone for Hagen: Chromatic Conditions is her first solo exhibition in Europe. She earned a BA in Studio Arts from Bard College and has previously exhibited primarily in the northeastern United States, including New York's Hudson Valley and New England. She lives and works in Newport, Rhode Island, and is represented by Jessica Hagen Fine Art + Design.
Seen together, the two exhibitions offer contrasting answers to a similar question: how much can abstraction carry?
For Diggs, it can hold memories, inherited histories, daily rituals and traces of community. A painted fast-food container can become as meaningful as a large canvas because the subject is not simply what appears on the surface, but the life accumulated around it.
For Hagen, abstraction becomes a way of reorganizing space itself. Color is not decoration but structure, pushing and bending the picture plane until it seems to contain an architecture that does not quite exist.
That contrast gives the paired presentations a natural dialogue. One artist builds outward from memory and material; the other from color and geometry. Yet both treat abstraction as something more than a retreat from the recognizable world. Instead, it becomes a way of finding structures beneath experience—emotional, spatial or historical.
Both projects also fit the broader mission of Castello 925, a multidisciplinary nonprofit gallery founded by psychoanalyst Luca Caldironi. The Venice space brings together visual art, literature and culture through exhibitions and conversations centered on questions of creativity and its origins.
Joe Diggs: In Venice will be presented at Castello 925, Sestiere Castello 925, Fondamenta San Giuseppe, while Whitney Hagen: Chromatic Conditions will be shown at the Castello 925 Gallery Annex at Fondamenta San Giuseppe 780. Both exhibitions run from September 24 through November 22, 2026, with an opening reception on September 26.
