“People often say, ‘Your work is much too cruel, it’s violent,’” the Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere told AIR MAIL last year. “And my reaction is always, ‘You should look closer.’” De Bruyckere works with bone, wood, and waxed animal skins to explore themes of death and the divine. Though at first glance the work might seem crude, she often adds blankets and cast wax to her ghostly figures, which gives them warmth and fragility. This exhibition, opening the same week as the Venice Biennale, sees De Bruyckere installing archangels, veiled and hybrid, in dialogue with the church of San Giorgio Maggiore—a magnificent relic of Palladian architecture that sits on a small island opposite the main city. The show, named after a song by Nick Cave, explores the theme of art as a place of refuge. —Elena Clavarino