The Pinacoteca Agnelli is dedicating its major fall 2026 exhibition to Alberto Savinio

The Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin kicks off its fall 2026 season with three new projects spanning the 20th century and contemporary art. As part of Turin Art Week, on Friday, October 30, 2026, the museum will present the retrospective *Alberto Savinio. *Souvenir*, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo, will be presented alongside the latest installment of the *Beyond the Collection* series dedicated to Chris Ofili and Iris Touliatou’s new project for *La Pista 500*, curated by Nicola Trezzi.

The program brings together three projects that differ in artistic language, generation, and perspective, yet are united by the intention to connect the Pinacoteca Agnelli’s Permanent Collection with new works and reinterpretations of art history. The program reaffirms the Turin museum’s role as a space for research and dialogue between historical heritage and contemporary artistic practices, with the collection serving as a starting point for new interpretations.

The season’s central project will be *Alberto Savinio. Souvenir*, open to the public from October 30, 2026, to April 4, 2027. Curated by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo, in collaboration with the Alberto Savinio Archive and with the support of an international scientific committee, the exhibition is the most significant show dedicated to the work of the artist, intellectual, and writer born in Athens in 1891 and who died in Rome in 1952. The exhibition will bring together approximately seventy-five works, including paintings and drawings, offering a new interpretation of Savinio’s artistic exploration from the 1920s to the early 1950s. A complex figure who defies categorization into a single discipline, Savinio explored music, literature, theater, and the visual arts, developing a visual language rooted in the coexistence of classical myth, memory, irony, and invention.

The exhibition will explore some of the most significant themes in his body of work: his relationship with the classical world and the Greece of his childhood, the theme of memory, family portraits, hybrid figures blending human and animal forms, his famous toys, anthropomorphic landscapes, and his graphic work, which gained increasing autonomy in the final years of his career. The exhibition will explore Savinio’s ability to anticipate issues that remain central to contemporary culture, from the relationship between identity and representation to the dialogue between cultures, from the construction of memory to the role of imagination as a tool for knowledge.

To accompany the project, Mousse Publishing will release a bilingual Italian-English catalog—the first institutional publication in English dedicated to the artist. The volume will feature original essays by international scholars, an iconographic section, and a chronology tracing Savinio’s personal and artistic journey, interweaving the visual arts, literature, and music.

From October 30, 2026, to April 4, 2027, visitors will also be able to view *Laure. Chris Ofili & Édouard Manet*, a new chapter in the *Beyond the Collection* series—a project through which the Pinacoteca Agnelli invites contemporary artists to engage with works from its Permanent Collection. Curated by Pietro Rigolo, the exhibition will feature Chris Ofili—an artist born in Manchester in 1968 and based in Port of Spain—presenting a new series of works inspired by Édouard Manet’s *Portrait of Laure*, a painting created around 1862 and held in the museum’s collection.

The project takes its starting point from the figure of Laure, the woman depicted by Manet, whose identity has long been shaped in art history by a previous title of the work that reduced her biographical complexity to a racial classification. Through new paintings and drawings, Ofili reflects on the way in which images contribute to the construction of identities and the definition of collective memory.

The British artist’s work weaves together historical references, personal experiences, cultural memory, and diverse figurative traditions, giving rise to a visual universe characterized by a strong narrative and chromatic component. The dialogue with Manet thus becomes an opportunity to address themes related to representation, the rewriting of art history, and the processes through which images acquire new meanings.

The project will be accompanied by a free publication featuring an unpublished essay by Denise Murrell, art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who is among the leading international scholars of Laure. Since 2022, the Beyond the Collection program has been one of the Pinacoteca Agnelli’s main areas of research, through collaborations with contemporary artists and Italian and international institutions.

The fall season will also include a new commission for La Pista 500 entrusted to Iris Touliatou, an artist selected in 2025 through the Pista 500 Prize, organized in collaboration with Artissima. The project, curated by Nicola Trezzi, will be developed within the context of the Pinacoteca Agnelli and will involve the Pista 500 billboard, extending also to the museum’s communication channels. Touliatou’s practice—she was born in Athens in 1981, where she lives and works—focuses on the relationships between places, production systems, and economic, social, and institutional dynamics. The new installation will reflect on the mechanisms through which images and messages are produced, distributed, and consumed, transforming the tools of institutional communication into constituent elements of the artwork.

La Pista 500 is the Pinacoteca Agnelli’s outdoor contemporary art project, born from the transformation of the former automobile test track on the roof of the Lingotto—the historic FIAT plant—into a hanging garden featuring a panoramic art trail. The works on display include sculptures, light and sound installations, and expanded cinema projects created by Italian and international artists, engaging in dialogue with the industrial architecture, the urban landscape, and the site’s industrial heritage.

With the fall 2026 season, the Pinacoteca Agnelli thus continues a journey that in recent years has expanded the museum’s role as a space for conservation, research, and cultural production. The reinterpretation of Alberto Savinio, the comparison between Chris Ofili and Édouard Manet, and the commission entrusted to Iris Touliatou outline a program that combines historical analysis with contemporary experimentation, offering new perspectives on the Permanent Collection and the museum’s role in the present.

The Pinacoteca Agnelli is dedicating its major fall 2026 exhibition to Alberto Savinio

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