Art cities: Turin

The Italian city of Turin has many claims to fame. Located in the foothills of the Alps, it was for centuries the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, and there are an array of palaces still to show for it. For most of the 20th century, the city was also an industrial hub — famous, above all, as the home of the car manufacturer Fiat, which at its peak employed 100,000 people here.

In recent decades, Turin has been busy reinventing itself as a post-industrial city. It hosted the Winter Olympic Games of 2006, for example. It also boasts a vibrant contemporary art scene, something that was clearly evident during the three-day Artissima art fair in November. Held in Oval Lingotto — an arena that staged speed skating at the aforementioned Olympics — Artissima welcomed 181 galleries this year.

Launched in 1994, and held annually, it is Italy’s only major fair devoted exclusively to contemporary art. Blue-chip galleries shared the space with a plethora of emerging counterparts, and there was even a booth — called Artissima Junior, supported by Turin’s Juventus football club — in which children aged six to 11 could collaborate on an art project.

‘This is not really a fair for confirming the reputation of artists who are already established,’ says Artissima’s director, Luigi Fassi. ‘It’s more a fair for seeking out discoveries. Based on three decades of practice, and thanks to intense scouting on a global level, we’re able to offer collectors an early chance to buy the works of artists [who are] on the cusp of big things.’

The participating galleries hailed from a total of 33 countries — from Thailand to Tunisia — with roughly a fifth never having exhibited at Artissima before. Opening at the same time as the fair were a wealth of exhibitions, most of them still on view. At Turin’s two big public institutions for new art — the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea — one can see shows by the sculptor Gianni Caravaggio and the Arte Povera great Michelangelo Pistoletto, respectively.

Another venue of note is the Fondazione Merz, which opened in 2005 in a building that had originally been the heating plant for a factory owned by the car firm Lancia. ‘There’s no doubt that Turin has had a change of identity since the end of the 20th century,’ says the foundation’s president, Beatrice Merz. ‘Industry declined, and contemporary art has played a role in replacing it.’ Literally so in the case of the Fondazione Merz, which occupies a tiny fraction of the city’s six million square metres of disused industrial land.

An even more eye-catching example of this shift can be found at OGR — Officine Grandi Riparazioni — an erstwhile train-repair workshop that became a multipurpose cultural centre in 2017. Currently on view there is American artist Sarah Sze’s atmospheric installation Metronome, which consists of a giant orb projecting countless images within a darkened gallery — a reflection on our age of information overload.

‘A lot of artists live and work in Turin,’ says Merz. ‘The standard of living is pretty high here, and the cost of living — certainly in contrast to somewhere comparable such as Milan [about 90 miles east] — is low.’

Let’s unpack that point slightly. First, the standard of living, which is high partly thanks to the rich variety of food and drink that comes from Turin and the surrounding region of Piedmont — including Bra sausage, Alba white truffles, Gianduiotto chocolate, Barolo wine and Lavazza coffee.

As for the cost of living, it’s worth noting that Turin’s population was around 1.2 million in 1980 and is around 850,000 now. This drop has been due largely to the decline in the number of industrial workers in the city — a knock-on effect of which is that housing and studio space for artists aren’t at a premium.

Among the Turin-based artists worth investigating are Renato Leotta, Alice Visentin, Guglielmo Castelli and English-born Cally Spooner, all of whom are younger than 45. Spooner, incidentally, is one of more than a dozen artists to have shown work in an ongoing outdoor project called La Pista 500, run by the Pinacoteca Agnelli museum in its stunning rooftop space above the old Fiat factory of Lingotto. The art is dotted around a one-time test track.

All that said, it would be recency bias to think that Turin’s embrace of contemporary art has occurred only in the past two or three decades. GAM can trace its roots back to 1863, when Turin — endowed by its Savoy rulers with a civic museum — became the first Italian city to display a public collection of modern art.

Then, of course, there was the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This largely revolved around activity in Turin, and many of its leading practitioners (Pistoletto, Giulio Paolini, Gilberto Zorio, Giuseppe Penone et al) still call the city home. Perhaps it’s best to say that Turin’s embrace of contemporary art is now simply more wholesale and more formalised than before.

‘This is a city that respects its past, but also always renews itself and invests in the future,’ says Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, president of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a private art foundation she founded in 1995. It hosts three major exhibitions each year, the latest a show by Polish artist Paulina Olowska, exploring sexual desire from a female perspective.

‘I think what’s crucial, in terms of Turin’s art scene, is the tradition here of collaboration between the public and private spheres,’ says Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. She cites, as an example close to her heart, the Young Curators Residency Programme, which her foundation has run since 2007, supporting the training of three budding art curators each year.

Historically speaking, Turin is an area of both high net-worth and a fondness for the arts (Puccini’s La Bohème was premiered in the city’s Teatro Regio in 1896). ‘For a long time, those two elements have come together profitably, the city’s wealth assisting its cultural scene,’ says Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

In this context, it’s worth considering, too, the recent activity of Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s biggest bank, whose headquarters are located in Turin. In 2022, it also opened a museum in the city, the Gallerie d’Italia: Torino, dedicated chiefly to contemporary photography. The bank says it seeks to engage the public as much as possible with its programme, and in February this year it helped the artist JR create a flash mob of 1,200 people displaying giant photographs in Turin’s grandest square, Piazza San Carlo, ahead of an exhibition of his at the museum.

As any visitor to Turin this holiday season will know, not all the art in the city is found indoors. Held annually since 1998, the Luci d’Artista light festival has become a much-loved local winter tradition. It consists of more than 20 light installations across town, by artists such as Daniel Buren and Rebecca Horn. These are switched on at six o’clock every evening, and the festival runs until mid-January. As examples of contemporary art lighting up Turin, they serve as a pretty good metaphor.

Gianni Caravaggio: Per analogiam is at GAM until 17 March 2024. Michelangelo Pistoletto: Molti di uno (Many of One) is at the Castello di Rivoli until 25 February. Sarah Sze: Metronome is at OGR until 11 February. Visual Persuasion: Paulina Olowska is at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo until 3 March. Mimmo Jodice: Senza tempo is at the Galleria d’Italia: Torino until 7 January. Turin’s 26th edition of Luci d’Artista runs until 14 January