Off-piste in Bergamo: art interprets winter sports

From Nov. 12, 2025 to Feb. 8, 2026, the Gres Art 671 space in Bergamo will host Fuoripista - Art, Sport and Winter, an exhibition project dedicated to winter sports, curated by 2050+ (Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and Erica Petrillo), with the participation of Francesca Acquati and exhibition design by 2050+. The exhibition is set in the context of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games and proposes an interdisciplinary reading of landscapes, gestures and practices related to mountains and winter sports, interweaving art, architecture, design and technological research.

The exhibition includes contemporary works, some specially commissioned for the occasion, and flanks paintings, installations, photographs, videos, historical works and archival materials. The artists involved, including Todd Antony, Ludwig Berger, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Ise Chonosuke, Giorgio De Marco, Eric Erbe & Victoria Weeks, The Invisible Mountain (Katharina Fleck & Giovanni Betti), Studio Folder, Vittore Grubicy De Dragon, Andreas Gursky, Barrie Jones, Randa Kherba (RKTIC), Armin Linke, Emilio Longoni, Marino Marini, MASBEDO, Kari Medig, Ondřej Mestek, Laura Millard, Carlo Mollino, James Niehues, Numechi.Studio (Giulia Bertolazzi and Cosimo Maffione), Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf, James Robertson, Fulvio Roiter, Françoise Sullivan, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Peter Waldner, and Walter Niedermayr, explore different perspectives of the mountain as a place of desire, exploration, and inquiry, from social, environmental, and technological as well as aesthetic perspectives.

“The imminence of the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” says Roberto Pesenti, president of Gres Art 671, “is an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen our mission, presenting art in dialogue with winter sports and continuing on the path of creating a cultural hub with an international vision, capable of engaging visitors as much as possible on issues of contemporary relevance. The projects carried out with IceLab ISU World Center of Excellence in Figure Skating, which was also the first step in the urban regeneration process of this area known as ’former Gres’ are examples of this ongoing effort. This exhibition, which sees a collaboration developed with the Department of Sport to encourage the involvement of young athletes, also pays homage to Bergamo’s recent nomination as European Capital of Sport 2027.”

“The selection of works in the exhibition returns the vision and artistic direction of Gres Art 671, which investigates the multidisciplinary and the valuable dialogue generated by placing ancient and contemporary works side by side,” adds Francesca Acquati, general manager Gres Art 671. “In this exhibition for the first time, unpublished artworks and research works produced and commissioned for the occasion by Gres Art 671 appear. It is an important step in the history of Gres, which commissioned MASBEDO, Numechi.studio (Giulia Bertolazzi and Cosimo Maffione) and Studio Folder works that were born in direct dialogue with the theme of the exhibition. Part of Gres Art 671’s mission is to support and encourage contemporary artistic production in Italy by concretely investing in the art system, offering artists spaces for experimentation and research.”

"FUORIPISTA is a journey that spans centuries and geography in the imagery of sport and winter," Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, 2050+, points out. "Art, design, technology and custom are intertwined in a kaleidoscopic narrative where sport becomes an art form and vice versa, while the idea of snow moves from a romantic nineteenth-century dimension to the highly technological and artificial one of contemporaneity, a system where networks and infrastructures become part of a complex and ever-changing landscape, from the Alps to the desert. Without nostalgia, FUORIPISTA returns a glimpse into how winter sports driven by globalization and technological progress have become a shared horizon and how their language has permeated our everyday life."

"FUORIPISTA investigates winter sports from noncanonical perspectives, usually excluded from official narratives, and which instead this exhibition strives to put back into the center," concludes Erica Petrillo, 2050+. “Thus, constellations of intimate voices emerge, a mosaic of visual narratives that recalibrate our view of winter sports, moving away from the classical geographies of snow. From Bolivia to Lesotho, from Afghanistan to Lebanon, FUORIPISTA offers a journey through landscapes and epistemologies often considered atypical or peripheral.”

Just a few kilometers from the mountains that will host the Olympic flashlight relay on Feb. 2, 2026, Fuoripista explores how skiing, field hockey, ice skating and bobsledding can be reinterpreted beyond pure sports performance. Gestures become indicators of social, aesthetic and cultural values and take on an artistic dimension, proposing a dialogue between the body, competition and the collective imagination of winter. The exhibition also considers the effects of climate change, tourism and technological innovations on the alpine landscape and sporting practices, investigating how snow and athletic gesture have been constructed and redefined over time.

The exhibition includes contemporary works, some specially commissioned, alongside paintings, installations, photographs, videos, historical works and archival materials. Among the masterpieces, Pieter Brueghel the Younger ’s Bird Trap and a large photograph from 2021 by Andreas Gursky dialogue with microstories that expand the geography of snow. Among them, the experiences of the Cholitas Escaladoras, indigenous Aymara women of the Bolivian Andes photographed by Todd Antony in 2019, rewrite the meaning of mountaineering; Zahra Lari, the first Emirati figure skater to compete in thehijab, becomes a symbol of emancipation; and Kari Medig’s photographs, taken from 2007 to 2025 at Afriski Mountain Resort in Lesotho’s Maloti Mountains, subvert the Eurocentric imagery of skiing as a Western practice.

The project also includes three new works that arose from direct commissions, enriching the collection and expanding the contemporary perspective of the exhibition. MASBEDO presents a video installation dedicated to Andrea Lanfri, a former Paralympic athlete who is now a mountaineer, Guinness World Record holder for the fastest mile at altitude and the first multiple amputee to independently climb Mount Everest, addressing the theme of inclusion in sport. Studio Folder develops a research project that reinterprets and visualizes spatial, environmental and statistical data from the Winter Olympic Games through figure skating choreography. Numechi.studio, with Giulia Bertolazzi and Cosimo Maffione, dedicates two works to IceLab Bergamo, an international center for figure skating next to the exhibition space, transforming Carolina Kostner’s athletic gesture into an immersive experience between body and space.

The path is developed in five sections:Olympics+,Winter Sports, Micro-stories, Winter Artificial and Cryosphere. The first section, Olympics+, analyzes the evolution of the Winter Olympic Games from the first editions in Chamonix and Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Milan-Cortina 2026, showing how the event has transformed Alpine territories into symbolic, media and geopolitical settings. Winter Sports explores the parallels between athletic and artistic gestures, with disciplines such as skating, bobsledding, curling and ski jumping becoming metaphors for balance, risk and grace. The Micro-stories section offers alternative narratives related to winter sports, showing how these practices can be transformed into tools of emancipation. Among the examples presented, the debut of the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Calgary Olympics and the stories of Hazara skiers in Afghanistan highlight how snow can become a terrain of cultural challenge, freedom and resistance. The collected stories trace an unprecedented atlas of winter, where different latitudes and traditions intertwine.

Winter Artificial addresses the reproduction of snow through technology, from the earliest artificial snow machines to indoor facilities built even in desert settings to virtual and digital versions. The section highlights the transformation of the contemporary winter landscape, showing how sports and culture can reach even those who do not live in snowy settings. Finally, Cryosphere concludes the exhibition by focusing on snow and ice as traces of a changing world. Fragments of glaciers, glacial sounds and pictorial works create a landscape suspended between presence and disappearance, offering a reflection on the impermanence of cold and the persistence of its imagery in contemporary culture and art.

To complement the exhibition, the Public Program, organized in collaboration with Fondazione Pesenti ETS, offers meetings, talks, screenings and activities open to the public, involving artists and Olympic and Paralympic athletes. The interventions aim to restore a living dimension of winter sports as a space of values, inclusion and innovation, dialoguing directly with the works on display and addressing issues such as mountains, sustainability and sports culture.

Off-piste in Bergamo: art interprets winter sports

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