Agnelli Art Gallery gets a makeover. Here are what will be new

The new Pinacoteca Agnelli will open to the public on May 27, 2022, but it has already unveiled its new identity, following the idea of new artistic director Sarah Cosulich: it will be a dynamic cultural center, open to the multidisciplinary languages of the present in dialogue with the historic Pinacoteca collection. A place dedicated to the production of new exhibitions and site-specific projects commissioned to Italian and international artists for its spaces; through research exhibition projects and collaborations with Italian and international institutions, the institution aims to be a place open to reflection on contemporary issues, devoted to the inclusion and participation of a multiplicity of different audiences.

The Pinacoteca’s new programming will also extend to the Lingotto’s rooftop runway, which will be enriched with installations by international artists to dialogue with the industrial architecture, the panorama over the city and the recently created garden on the runway. Thanks to FIAT’s conversion project, the Pista 500 is currently the tallest rooftop park in Europe with its 40,000 plants of more than three hundred different native species.

The design lines

There will be three design lines that will characterize the exhibition program at Pinacoteca Agnelli, starting with a reflection on the narratives produced by Lingotto’s industrial legacy and the museum’s identity, which is strongly linked to its permanent collection.

BEYOND THE COLLECTION - Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Collection
Twenty years after the inauguration of Renzo Piano’s Scrigno installation, the Pinacoteca introduces an unprecedented ongoing exhibition project dedicated to the reinterpretation and reactivation of its permanent collection through its presences and absences. Starting each time from a different work placed in relation with others from international institutions, the Agnelli Collection will become a starting point for a reflection on art history and historiography, as well as a critical tool for approaching the present.

The first Beyond the Collection project will be dedicated to Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar thanks to a collaboration with the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. On the occasion of Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. A Dialogue with the Fondation Beyeler, curated by Sarah Cosulich, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, and Beatrice Zanelli (May 27 to Sept. 25, 2022), Picasso’s portrait Homme appuyé sur une table (1915-1916) preserved in the Pinacoteca will be placed for the first time in dialogue with Picasso’s series of portraits from the 1930s depicting Dora Maar, which came from the Fondation Beyeler. At the same time, along with the canvases, a selection of photographs by Maar herself will also be presented. The exhibition project aims to bring to light Dora Maar not only as the subject of Pablo Picasso’s portrayal, but as a central artist in the history of twentieth-century art and an intellectual point of reference for Picasso’s artistic practice.

Exhibitions

The third floor will host exhibitions conceived and produced by the Art Gallery: these will be both monographic projects dedicated to contemporary artists and collective projects focused on transhistorical and multigenerational paths in order to open new readings of art history in relation to contemporary art practices.

From May 27, 2022 to January 15, 2023, the exhibition Sylvie Fleury. Turn Me On, curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A pioneer and important point of reference for emerging practices, Sylvie Fleury over the past three decades has pursued a multifaceted research that goes beyond currents and categories. Through different languages, from sculpture to neon painting to installation, the artist draws on objects and imagery from the fields of fashion, science fiction, and pop subcultures, investigating the mechanisms of value construction and the fabrication of desires in contemporary society. Fleury addresses themes such as the tension between gender politics, consumerism, and contemporary culture.

The Runway 500

Sculptures and installations commissioned from international female artists will be placed on the historic automobile track on the roof of the Lingotto. Transformed into a roof garden thanks to FIAT’s conversion in the project by architects Camerana&Partners, the Runway 500 is being opened to the city as an inclusive and multifunctional space dedicated to public art. Projects will include environmental installations, light works, sound and expanded cinema installations, and architectural projects. The space is constructed with the artists involved, reasoning about the transformation of the Lingotto’s industrial archeology from a closed circuit to a city street, from a productive place to an open space to be inhabited together. The program will be enriched with new installations gradually over the next three years, building an evolving exhibition itinerary.

Mission

The exhibition projects will be aimed at building a strong programmatic identity for the institution, which is also the result of a confrontation with the specificity of the place that hosts it: the cultural and social history of Lingotto; the relationship with the image of the automobile as a symbol of speed and innovation and with the manufacturing context of Turin; the presence of industrial archaeology and its architectural development. It will be a place that looks at the past with the eyes of the present, to reactivate experiences, recount forgotten figures, and complicate the canonical narrative of art history in light of the needs of contemporary society.

The 2022 projects also aim to challenge the traditionally masculine narr ative of art history up to the twenty-first century as well as the imagery of the automobile, bringing plural perspectives to a place historically marked by iconographies, symbols, and narratives made by men.

Carrying out the new mission of Pinacoteca along with the new artistic direction will also be a new team articulated in the curatorial, communication, collection and education departments, with the inclusion of staff figures responsible for individual activities. The institution’s activities also include a performative and discursive public program aimed at deepening and expanding the exhibition programming and making it accessible to a wide audience.

New visual identity

The institution will also have a new visual identity. In the new Pinacoteca logo, Agnelli’s “A,” while remaining ever-present, becomes lowercase to emphasize a new direction for the museum as an accessible and inclusive, dynamic and contemporary space open to all. The visual identity is intended to emphasize the opening of the Pinacoteca’s programming on the Pista 500: the circular shape of the logo is derived from the curve of the track itself.

Image: Pinacoteca Agnelli. Credits Mybosswas

Agnelli Art Gallery gets a makeover. Here are what will be new

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