Artissima Internazionale d’Arte Contemporanea di Torino announces its 33rd edition, scheduled from Friday, Oct. 30 to Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026 at theOval Lingotto Fiere. The preview is set for October 29, while the opening to the public will take place over the following three days. The 2026 edition coincides with the fifth year of Luigi Fassi’s direction, a continuity that the fair interprets as the consolidation of a progressive and structured curatorial path over time.
Over the course of the five editions under Fassi’s direction, Artissima has defined a working method that has gradually strengthened its identity. On the one hand, the fair has configured itself as a space for critical reflection on contemporary art, and on the other it has maintained its function as an international commercial platform. Alongside these two dimensions is a third, increasingly central component related to cultural diplomacy and the building of relationships between institutions, galleries, artists and different geographical contexts.
According to the approach of the artistic direction, the fair has structured itself as a system capable of connecting heterogeneous subjects and languages, fostering dialogue between the local dimension and the global scenario. In this perspective, Artissima is described as a space of confrontation in which art operates as a tool of imagination and transformation of the gaze, contributing to redefine the ways of observing and interpreting the present.
The 2026 edition will be held with the support of Main Partner Intesa Sanpaolo and with the collaboration of Gallerie d’Italia - Turin, the bank’s museum, which is supporting the event for the seventh consecutive year. The fair will be divided into the four historical sections Main Section, New Entries, Monologue/Dialogue and Art Editions, along with the three curated sections Present Future, Back to the Future and Drawings, all housed in the spaces of the Oval Lingotto Fiere, a 20,000-square-meter glass and steel structure located in the Turin exhibition center.
Among the first novelties announced for 2026 is the theme chosen for the edition, Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body. The title takes its start from a reflection by philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum and proposes an interpretation of artistic language as a force capable of articulating itself in flexible and dynamic forms. The concept of fancy, understood as the forward projection of imagination, is interpreted as a principle of movement and openness, capable of traversing differences and complexities without reducing them to simplifying syntheses.
Within this framework, art is described as a practice that contributes to delineating what might exist. This function is traced back to a form of public intelligence, capable of affecting the fabric of democratic institutions and community building. The fair is thus proposed as a device for direct experience, in which the encounter with artworks takes the form of a physical and accelerated confrontation, capable of activating new modes of perception.
“This year’s theme recounts the acrobatic quality of fancy, the projective force of imagination made possible by art,” says Luigi Fassi. “According to Martha C. Nussbaum, fancy is a language that must be continually trained: a faculty capable of pushing beyond the obvious, transcending the object and opening a more benevolent gaze toward the other in our moral, political and civic relations. In this transformative capacity lies one of the most profound functions of art: to modify the beholder, refining the possibility of recognizing oneself in the experience of others. It is the very form of art - corporeal, complex, mobile - that guides us toward this openness, in a democratic exercise of the gaze, which opposes rigidity and closures through the free movement of the imagination. Artissima has always been a place where thought takes shape through unexpected encounters: between different works, bodies, ideas and sensibilities. Fancy then seems to us to be a word capable of narrating not only the energy of contemporary art, but also the continuous movement of the fair itself, its being a living space of experimentation, intuition and discovery.”
On the organizational side, Artissima confirms the selection committee for Main Section, Monologue/Dialogue, New Entries and Art Editions. The group is composed of international professionals in the field: Paola Capata of Monitor between Rome, Lisbon and Pereto; Philippe Charpentier of mor charpentier between Paris and Bogotá; Guido Costa of Guido Costa Projects in Turin; Emanuel Layr of Layr in Vienna; Francesco Lecci of Clima in Milan; Antoine Levi of Ciaccia Levi between Paris and Turin; and Elsa Ravazzolo Botner of A Gentil Carioca between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
The four historical sections maintain a subdivision that reflects the different declinations of the contemporary art system. Main Section is dedicated to internationally established galleries and offers a high-profile review aimed at collectors and the public. New Entries welcomes emerging galleries with less than five years of activity, at their first participation in the fair. Monologue/Dialogue, on the other hand, is reserved for realities that choose an experimental approach, with monographic stands or comparisons between two artists. Art Editions brings together galleries and nonprofit spaces focused on editions, prints and multiples.
In parallel, the curatorial team confirms its composition for the three curated sections, which are developed through monographic projects. Present Future is entrusted for the third year to Léon Kruijswijk, performance curator at Mudam in Luxembourg, and Joel Valabrega, independent curator active between Porto and Milan. The section is dedicated to emerging talents and new trends in the international art scene.
Back to the Future, also confirmed for the third year, is curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, director of the Albuquerque Foundation in Sintra, and Heike Munder, an independent curator and writer based in Zurich. The section is devoted to contemporary art historical figures active between the 1930s and 1990s, who in different contexts developed practices in opposition to dominant systems of thought.
For the Drawings section, the curatorship of Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, curator of Collezione Ramo di Milano and Milano Drawing Week, is confirmed for the fifth year. The section, the only one in the Italian fair scene entirely dedicated to drawing, presents projects conceived as solo exhibitions, with a focus on the autonomy of the medium on paper.
The visual identity of the 2026 edition is again entrusted to the Turin-based graphic design studio FIONDA, with which Artissima is collaborating for the ninth consecutive year. The graphic system developed for 2026 interprets the theme Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body through a progressive transformation of the fair’s visual language. Historical logos, reinterpreted as brackets, are inserted into a dynamic system that modifies shapes and relationships, generating ever-changing configurations. The result is an identity that reinterprets its own tradition to open itself to new possibilities of representation.
Artissima is organized by Artissima srl, a Fondazione Torino Musei company established in 2008 to manage the fair’s artistic and commercial relationships. The brand belongs to the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region and the Metropolitan City of Turin. The realization of the event is supported by the entities that own the brand together with Fondazione CRT, Fondazione Arte CRT, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and the Turin Chamber of Commerce. Since 2010, the fair has been held at Oval Lingotto Fiere, an exhibition space also used during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin and included in the Lingotto complex.
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| Artissima 2026, imagination and contemporary at the heart of the new edition |
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