Venice Biennale 2013: The Encyclopedic Palace, Central Pavilion and Arsenale, review Appropriately enough, the exhibition contains many variations on the idea of collecting - including rare specimens of stone emblazoned with swirling patterns gathered by the French intellectual Roger Caillois; the pages of the American Minimalist Carl Andre's surprisingly un-minimalist, 100-page scrapbook Passport, which is chock full of diverse and fascinating imagery; or a series of more than 40 black-and-white photographs taken by JD "Okhai Ojeikere recording fluctuating fashions in the hairstyles of Nigerian women from the Sixties to today. Andre may be a big name, but The Encyclopedic Palace also teems with creative spirits like Auriti who operated outside of the mainstream art world, such as the Chinese artist Guo Fengyi, a former technician in a rubber plant who made drawings so dense and detailed that they appear to be made out of animal fur rather than pencil or ink. In a similar vein, elsewhere we find a memorable menagerie of terracotta figures, animals and masks, each one bristling with scores of menacing clay spikes, by the autistic Japanese artist Shinichi Sawada; the American Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's obsessive photographs of his wife in an array of intimate and erotic poses; and naïve pencil drawings by tribal islanders in southeast Asia. The intricately handcrafted dolls of the self-taught American Morton Bartlett feel subtly perverted, like a group of coquettish Lolitas remaining just this side of propriety. Dolls and dollhouses are a motif of the exhibition. As well as engravings by the Surrealist Hans Bellmer, who photographed specially constructed, ball-jointed, prepubescent female mannequins, we see dollhouse-like scenes by the Romanian artist Andra Ursuta, 387 model buildings constructed by the unknown Austrian insurance clerk Peter Fritz, and a brilliant sculptural tableau by the British artist Cathy Wilkes, whose expressionless, rough-hewn mannequins, arranged next to scraps of faded textiles and fragments of pottery, are melancholic and affecting. Gioni often favours work that is just this side of unhinged: in general, there is a sense of powerful imaginations unharnessed and let loose. This no-holds-barred intensity is visible, say, in the neon, toxic colours of the semi-psychotic self-portraits of the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, who appears to be in meltdown before our eyes. Along with the Italian Marisa Merz, who was associated with the Arte Povera movement in the Sixties and Seventies, Lassnig is the recipient of a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement this year. Occasionally, artistic intensity is a corollary of sexual desire, as in the filthy, compulsive erotica of the Russian Evgenij Kozlov, or in the buxom, burlesque compositions in coloured pencil on cardboard by the untrained German artist Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern. As well as Schröder-Sonnenstern, who died in 1982, Gioni includes a number of historical figures whose work prefigures the exhibition's central argument, such as the rebellious occultist Aleister Crowley; the Surrealist painter, sculptor and poet Dorothea Tanning; and the psychotherapist Carl Jung, whose Red Book, a private compendium of his personal apocalyptic visions, forms the opening to the Central Pavilion. Look out, too, for the cryptic, hallucinatory imagery of Heaven and Earth Magic, a stop-motion film collage by the American Harry Smith, who died in 1991, as well as the witty and whimsical Surrealist drawings of beasts in incongruous domestic settings by the Italian Domenico Gnoli (1933-1970). Another big theme is a strong return for figurative sculpture, visible in the work of Matthew Monahan, Hans Josephsohn, and others. In a room guest-curated by the American artist Cindy Sherman, we find Miroslaw Balka's creepy Black Pope and Black Sheep (1987). Nearby in the Arsenale is a limbo-like chamber filled with Polish artist Pawel Althamer's installation Venetians (2013): 90 ghoulish grey figures, modelled out of plaster casts of the faces and hands of local people, combined with strips of plastic resembling exposed musculature attached to rough-and-ready scaffolding supports. In the modernist sculpture garden of the Central Pavilion, British artist Sarah Lucas is showing six bronze works, each one transforming the twisted forms of stuffed nylon stockings into new humanoid shapes, many of them absurdly priapic. Phyllida Barlow's painted polystyrene boulders, hung from the ceiling of the Arsenale, are an exception to this trend. As befits an exhibition bursting with energy and ideas, I do not have space here to do more than scratch the surface. I left the show impressed and excited by Gioni's vision of a new mode of art-making: one that champions the fantastical, the forgotten, and the bizarre, looking backwards beyond Modernism to richer and stranger sources of inspiration. For too long now, contemporary art has belonged to big-ticket artists, churning out signature work that feels overly glossy and slick. What we find in The Encyclopedic Palace is something different: an exhibition privileging wonkier, more homespun offerings by lesser-known talents. Here is a view of the human imagination as an untameable beast, dominated by dark desires and impulses, now finally unleashed and allowed to roam free. From June 1 until Nov 24; labiennale.org