Barry X Ball’s Sculptures Perfectly at Home in a Grand Venice Basilica

When Carmelo Grasso, abbot and curator at the San Giorgio Maggiore convent in Venice, saw a sculpture by New York artist Barry X Ball Pope St. John Paul II (2012-24), he knew he wanted to mount an exhibition in the magnificent church where he worked. The resulting exhibition, “The Shape of Time,” organized by curator Bob Nickas, includes 23 works, many of which are on public view for the first time, and centers on this extremely refined work, which depicts the pope who became a global celebrity in the 1970s and 1980s. It stands in the choir, its bright metal complementing the dark carved wood pews.

Although it is only over two feet tall, Pope St. John Paul II Capturing your attention with sumptuous silver filigree and 18-karat gold, the evocative image of the pope is crafted to echo the reliquary; there are countless narrative magnificences hidden within. Cast in partnership with Italian jewelry company Damiani, it took twelve years to make and depicts a Polish pope (a rare non-Italian pope) whose fame makes today’s leaders of the Catholic Church seem somewhat obscure by comparison.

“John Paul was part of the Solidarity Movement, was a playwright, and loved football and skiing,” Ball noted during a walkthrough for the show on Tuesday. “This is not your typical view of a pope.” Hidden within the exquisite sculpture are John Paul’s old enemies – Hitler, Stalin and Lenin – as well as biographical details, such as a pair of skis and a bullet referring to a 1981 assassination attempt on him by Turkish killer Mehmet Ali Ağca. Bauer noted with satisfaction that the Pope later visited his would-be assassin in his cell and forgave him. He also noted references to three Abrahamic religions, alluding to John Paul’s visit to the spiritual home of all three religions during his journey to Jerusalem.

Designed by Andrea Palladio and completed in 1610, the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore is one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, with its white marble facade rising above the lagoon opposite Piazza San Marco. The lavishly decorated interior showcases Bauer’s opulent and sophisticated creations in materials such as Belgian and Vietnamese marble and Iranian onyx. The non-profit branch of the Benedictine community in San Giorgio Maggiore considers hospitality and the organization of contemporary art exhibitions an integral part of its institutional mission. While religious orders have a long history of commissioning leading contemporary artists, in the Benedictine view this connection has waned over the last century or so. To revive this tradition, they have invited internationally renowned artists to exhibit, including Berlinde de Bruyckere, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, Luc Tuymans and Ai Weiwei.

A study of these histories helps to understand Bauer’s overall oeuvre, which is closely tied to many artistic precedents. Monumental sculptures from the artist’s “Masterpiece” series appear in the church’s magnificent nave and transepts, including Pieta (2011-22), inspired by Michelangelo’s unfinished works Rondanini Pieta (1552–53). Bauer transformed it with translucent golden-white Iranian onyx. “Michelangelo had been working on this just days before his death, essentially building his own funerary monument,” Ball said. Ball noted that art historian Leo Steinberg interpreted the long-neglected and nearly forgotten mysterious work as Christ actually carrying his mother in grief, noting that he himself transformed Christ’s face into Michelangelo’s.

In the transept there is also a towering Saint Bartholomew was skinned (2011-20), inspired by a 16th-century work by the Lombard sculptor Marco d’Agrate, located in Milan’s Duomo, depicts the martyred saint’s torso wrapped in his own skin. (Bauer laughs and notes that when he first saw the original, he thought the man was wearing a robe.) To fit its bloody theme, Ball crafted his version out of what he calls “bloody” French ruby ​​marble.

“I’m not talking about mechanical reproduction. I’m trying to get into the soul of the work I’m creating,” Ball said of art history. His forays into soul, though, involve some very high-tech processes; a giant robot in his studio has been running 24/7 for about seven weeks, milling a single workpiece. This assistance has earned him some critics. “Look at the comments on Instagram,” he said wryly during a recent studio visit, “I am the death of art.”

Born in Pasadena in 1955 and raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, Ball worked out of an impressive home/studio complex in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, where he employed approximately 15 full-time artists. Although he uses complex computer programs as well as 3D scanning and printing, the works are always done by extensive handwork, requiring thousands of hours of labor in total for each piece.

Although Ball’s auction record is sparse—only 13 works have come to market since 2017, according to the Artnet Price Database—his works have achieved high prices, with a high of $545,000, sleeping hermaphrodite (2008-10) sold at Christie’s New York in 2016. Four other pieces have sold since 2018 for six-figure sums. Around the same time, the artist has been the subject of international solo exhibitions, including at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, as well as group shows at such venues as the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. His work is in numerous collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Magasin 3 Stockholm Museum of Art, and the Panza Collection in Switzerland.

Ball’s work has also won critical acclaim. this new yorkerIn 2009, he compared his riffs on art history to contemporary reimaginings of classic literature, saying “he makes a delicate masterpiece weird.” In 2025, Pulitzer Prize winner Sebastian Smee washington postsaid the Buddha sculpture “is the embodiment of an artistic idea that is both dazzling and ancient.”

In the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, three stone statues of Buddha appear in the sacristy, arranged in the shape of a cross. Mirror Buddha Herms (2018-23) incorporates a fifteenth-century Japanese lacquered wood Buddha statue facing one of Bauer’s own works made of Belgian black marble. Echoing the way that Pope John Paul’s ecumenism appealed to Bauer, the artist gratefully noted that this was the first time the Buddha had appeared on the church’s grounds. Located in front of an existing painting, Buddha (2018-25) seamlessly combines golden honeycomb calcite, wounded Mexican (Baja) onyx, more French Rouge de Roi marble and translucent pink Iranian onyx on a base of Vietnamese white marble.

Venice has historically been a crossroads between East and West. Combining stones from around the world (including those from Iran, currently under attack from the United States), Ball’s work is hard not to see as a welcoming gesture from an artist who emerged from his narrow upbringing toward the ecumenism of John Paul, the progressive pope whose strange portrait inspired this impressive exhibition.

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