The fall 2025 season of Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin opens under the sign of renewal and cultural density. Starting on Friday, October 31, 2025, during the week of Artissima, Italy’s most important event dedicated to contemporary art, the Turin museum will inaugurate two major exhibition projects that will accompany the public until April 6, 2026.
They are the first Italian retrospective entitled I Am the Century dedicated to Alice Neel (Gladwyne, 1900 - New York, 1984), an American painter now recognized as one of the most acute and complex voices of the twentieth century, and the site-specific installation Faux Amis by Piotr Uklański (Warsaw, 1968), an internationally renowned Polish artist whose research moves with agility between irony, criticism and reinvention of artistic language. The two projects, distinct in languages and perspectives, ideally dialogue on the theme of portraiture, the body and the gaze, offering a multifaceted reflection on the representation of identity.
Alice Neel. I Am the Century, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo, is a powerful tribute to an artist who spanned the entire 20th century, tracing its most intimate and hidden contours. Long considered marginal to the dominant narrative of American painting, Neel is now recognized as a central figure in the redefinition of the portrait genre, capable of challenging the aesthetic and ideological codes of her time.
The exhibition unfolds through a thematic and chronological journey that highlights the coherence of his vision over more than seven decades: from the 1920s, marked by a lyrical and empathy-laden realism, to the works of the 1970s, when Neel’s painting became a political and social tool, a mirror of racial, gender and class tensions. The portraits on display return a full humanity, sometimes fragile, sometimes proud, always authentic. Politicians, artists, workers, friends, strangers: each subject is charged with a living presence, never idealized, always deeply felt.
Also on view are photographs, letters and archival materials. Dialoguing with this intimate and political human universe is the ironic and disorienting voice of Piotr Uklański, an artist whose practice for years has been unhinging the conventions of visual art to probe the mechanisms of perception, memory and collective identity. His intervention, entitled Faux Amis, curated by Sarah Cosulich, is part of the Beyond the Collection cycle, launched in 2022 to open new perspectives on the permanent holdings of the Pinacoteca. Literally “false friends,” “faux amis” in linguistics are those words that are similar in two languages but have different meanings; Uklański makes this semantic ambiguity his own to construct a visual narrative made up of dissonant juxtapositions, iconographic short-circuits and learned references. His works, located in the Casket that holds the masterpieces of the Agnelli collection, resonate, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, with the great masters of the past: from Renoir to Manet, from Canova to Bellotto. The artist operates as a postmodern archaeologist, disassembling and reassembling images of tradition to reveal their historical stratifications and ideological implications, playing with the viewer in a continuous shift between the familiar and the uncanny.
But Faux Amis does not end in the museum space. In line with the transdisciplinary approach that characterizes the Pinacoteca’s curatorial vision, Uklański’s intervention extends to the city’s cultural fabric, involving two outstanding scientific realities: the Luigi Rolando Museum of Human Anatomy and the Francesco Garnier Valletti Fruit Museum. In these places, where art meets science, the artist establishes a sensitive and provocative dialogue with the permanent collections. At the Museum of Human Anatomy, Uklański explores the physical and symbolic dimensions of the body, relating his works to anatomical models. At the Fruit Museum, on the other hand, the artist works on the ambiguity between nature and artifice, between beauty and decadence, making his compositions dialogue with the formal perfection of the wax fruits in the collection. The result is an experience that challenges the categories of perception and verisimilitude, questioning the viewer on the fine line between scientific representation and cultural construction.
With these two projects, Pinacoteca Agnelli reaffirms its vocation as a cultural laboratory capable of combining research, experimentation and international openness. An identity that is also strengthened by the arrival, in June 2025, of two new figures in the curatorial team: Nicola Trezzi, appointed curator after his significant experience at the helm of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv-Yafo, and Raphaële Sevrain, assistant curator. Both will work alongside director Sarah Cosulich and chief curator Pietro Rigolo, who returned to Italy after his years at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, helping to develop an editorial line that weaves critical rigor, curatorial vision and contemporary sensibility. Pinacoteca Agnelli’s fall 2025 programming thus presents itself as an invitation to discovery and reflection, in a journey that spans the centuries to interrogate the present. A museum proposal that is not afraid of complexity, and that continues to decline the exhibition dimension as a space of relationship, confrontation and imagination.
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| Two visions between painting and contemporary: Alice Neel and Piotr Uklański at Pinacoteca Agnelli |
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