Building Bridges

What you're looking at

At the end of a canal in the Arsenale, the old naval dockyard of Venice, six pairs of colossal forearms rise out of the water. Each pair leans in from opposite banks and meets in the middle, fingertips touching, palms interlocking or one hand gripping another, so that together they form six arches across the basin. Boats could pass beneath them. Standing on the quay, you look up at hands about fifteen meters high, larger than the brick boathouses behind them, and the scale makes the gesture feel both tender and architectural.

The pairs do not all meet the same way. Some hands interlock their fingers; others only touch or reach toward one another across the gap, a distant echo of the near-touch of God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The variety is the point: each pair stands for a different human value, and each value is given its own kind of contact.

The surface is smooth and white. Quinn made the hands in resin finished to evoke the white Istrian stone and marble that dress so much of Venice, so that from a distance they read as stone. Up close you notice the creases of knuckles and the tendons of the wrists, modeled with the same attention to anatomy that runs through all his work.

The six values

The six pairs represent friendship, faith, help, love, hope and wisdom. The artist and Halcyon Gallery, which presented the work, framed it as a statement about what people share across differences, geographic, cultural, philosophical and emotional. Quinn called Venice "the city of bridges" and chose it as the place to argue that people should build bridges rather than walls, a pointed message in 2019, when the politics of borders and walls dominated the news in Europe and the United States.

How it was made and shown

Building Bridges was unveiled on 9 May 2019, at the opening of the Venice Art Biennale season, with a ceremony that featured the tenor Andrea Bocelli, a performance by the pianist Lola Astanova and the Mayor of Venice. It was presented by Halcyon Gallery, Quinn's London gallery, during the Biennale season. It remained on view until 24 November 2019. Like most large works installed in Venice for the Biennale, it was temporary; the basin no longer holds it.

The site mattered. The Arsenale was for centuries the industrial heart of the Venetian Republic, a shipyard so efficient that Dante described it in the Inferno. Setting six bridges of hands in a place built to launch warships turned a site of military power into one of human connection.

Where it fits in Quinn's work

Lorenzo Quinn (born 1966), a Rome-born sculptor and the son of the actor Anthony Quinn, has made hands his signature subject for decades. He has said that hands carry more meaning than any other part of the body: they create, destroy, love and hate. His best-known earlier piece, Support (2017), showed two giant hands rising out of the Grand Canal to prop up the walls of the Ca' Sagredo Hotel, a warning about climate change and rising waters. Photographs of Support spread worldwide and made Quinn's hands one of the most recognized images in contemporary public art.

Building Bridges expanded that idea from a single gesture into a sequence. Where Support was a warning, the later work is a proposal. Both use the same strategy: a familiar part of the body, enlarged until it rivals the buildings of Venice, placed where it interacts directly with water and architecture.

Meaning and reception

The sculpture's message is direct, and Quinn intends it to be. There is no hidden iconography to decode; the work relies on the universal readability of hands. Critics who prefer more ambiguous art have found Quinn's work too literal. Its public has disagreed: the installation was one of the most photographed sights of the 2019 Biennale season, and it remains a popular search for people looking for images of it.

What gives the piece more depth than a slogan is the variety of the gestures. Seen one after another, the six pairs suggest that connection has many forms, some hesitant, some firm, some dependent, and that a bridge can be made by people who only just reach each other. For other sculptors working with the body at monumental or public scale, see Daniel Arsham's Holding Hands and Jason deCaires Taylor's underwater Ocean Atlas.

Where to see it now

Building Bridges was a temporary installation in the Arsenale basin in the Castello district of Venice from May to November 2019, and it is no longer on site. Photographs from the installation are the main way to see it today. More of Quinn's work, including Support, is on the Lorenzo Quinn page.