David Ebony is one of the most influential voices in American art criticism today. A contributing editor of Art in America, with regular writing for Yale University Press online, Artnet News, and The Brooklyn Rail, he has spent decades shaping the critical conversation around contemporary art.
So when Ebony singles out an exhibition in Venice, it is worth paying attention.
David Černý is hardly a stranger to critical attention himself. His work has been exhibited internationally, presented in major institutional contexts, and written about extensively over the course of a career spanning more than three decades.
What makes Ebony’s new review of Artocalypsa particularly noteworthy is something more specific: in a Venice season crowded with exhibitions, national pavilions, collateral events, and no shortage of artists competing for attention, he chose to single Černý out.
Writing for The Brooklyn Rail, Ebony places Artocalypsa firmly within the larger cultural and political landscape surrounding the 61st Venice Biennale—and makes a persuasive case for looking beyond Černý’s considerable talent for provocation.
While much of the Biennale and its surrounding exhibitions approach the present political moment with relative subtlety, Ebony identifies Artocalypsa as a conspicuous exception: direct, uncomfortable, theatrical and unapologetically political.
He calls it a “riveting, museum-quality independent solo show.”
It is an important distinction. Černý’s work is frequently discussed in terms of controversy, humor and spectacle—understandably so. He once painted a Soviet tank pink, after all. Subtle obedience was probably never going to be the career plan.
But Ebony looks beyond the punchline.
Writing about the exhibition’s images of political power, gun violence and nuclear destruction, he finds something more consequential beneath Černý’s characteristic irreverence. The grotesque, absurd and occasionally very funny are not ends in themselves. They are mechanisms for confronting subjects that have become so omnipresent that conventional imagery can struggle to make us look at them at all.
That distinction may be particularly important with Artocalypsa.
The exhibition brings together works spanning more than three decades of Černý’s practice alongside recent installations, creating a broader picture of an artist whose provocations have always contained a remarkably consistent preoccupation with power: who possesses it, how it is exercised, and what happens when technology amplifies humanity’s less admirable instincts.
Ebony ultimately argues against reading these works as shock for shock’s sake. Beneath their deliberately unsettling surfaces, he sees an invitation to consider something considerably larger: the fate of humanity and even, however improbably, the possibility of redemption.
For Černý, that may be about as close to optimism as one should reasonably expect.
David Černý: Artocalypsa remains on view at Il Teatro dell’Arte (NuoveFondamenta) in Venice through November 6, 2026.
David Ebony’s complete review, “David Černý: Artocalypsa,” appears in the October 2026 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.
READ DAVID EBONY’S REVIEW IN THE BROOKLYN RAIL →