Punta della Dogana is the extreme tip of Dorsoduro, the wedge of land separating the Grand Canal from the Giudecca Canal, facing St Mark's Basin. The building that occupies it is the Dogana da Mar, built between 1677 and 1682 to a design by Giuseppe Benoni for the inspection of goods arriving by sea, recognisable by its tower with the two atlantes holding up the golden sphere of Fortune. After decades of abandonment, in 2007 the concession was entrusted to François Pinault; Tadao Ando's restoration, completed in 2009, preserved the brick walls and wooden trusses while inserting exposed concrete partitions. Since then it has been, together with Palazzo Grassi, an exhibition venue of the Pinault Collection in Venice.

From 6 April to 23 November 2025 the spaces hosted "Genealogies", the first major Italian exhibition devoted to Thomas Schütte, curated by Camille Morineau and Jean-Marie Gallais. The exhibition featured around fifty sculptures, largely from the Pinault collections among the world's most important holdings of the artist's work supplemented by loans from Schütte himself, and around one hundred works on paper, many never exhibited before.

Trained at the Düsseldorf Academy under Gerhard Richter and awarded the Golden Lion at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Schütte has worked for forty years on the human figure and the crisis of the monument: deformed bodies, caricatural heads, pairs of "united enemies" bound together, reclining women in bronze and steel.

The exhibition's title alluded to the internal genealogies of this repertoire; the itinerary, organised by families of works rather than by chronology, showed how each figure originates in drawing and then migrates across different materials from clay to wax, from ceramic to glass, from steel to bronze.