Around 1840, on seeing an early daguerreotype, French painter Paul Delaroche is famously supposed to have declared, “From today, painting is dead.” In 2021, Swiss artist Peter Fischli pensively replies, “And yet . . .” “Stop Painting,” the “panoptic exhibition” of works by more than eighty artists that he has curated for Fondazione Prada in Venice, offers what he calls a “kaleidoscope of repudiated gestures, including the critique of those repudiated gestures.”

This brainy enterprise threads a story full of plots and subplots through a mental and visual itinerary that opens up the usually rigid