Intesa Sanpaolo

Intesa Sanpaolo confirms its support for the new edition of Artissima, as the fair’s Main Partner for the fifth year. The fair and Intesa Sanpaolo share the idea that art is a fundamental driver to reactivate virtuous mechanisms of social dynamism and cultural enrichment.

In 2024, Artissima and Intesa Sanpaolo presented the third edition of their moving image project, The Underground Cinema, curated by Irene Calderoni (Artistic Director, Scuola Piccola Zattere, Venezia). The exhibition have been held at Gallerie d’Italia – Torino. This exhibition of video works, many exhibited for the first time in Italy, featured artists represented by galleries participating in Artissima: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz (Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam), Alice Bucknell (IMPORT EXPORT, Warsaw), Stephanie Comilang (ChertLüdde, Berlin), Pauline Curnier Jardin (Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, ChertLüdde, Berlin), Valentina Furian (UNA, Piacenza), Lungiswa Gqunta (WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town), Beatrice Marchi (Federico Vavassori, Milano), Lili Reynaud Dewar (Layr, Vienna), and Silvia Rivas (Rolf Art, Buenos Aires).
Inspired by the exhibition space’s immersive, underground architecture, the title referenced Robert Smithson’s reflections on cinema as a physical and psychological experience of abandonment and torpor, where memory gets lost in a “forest elsewhere”. The kaleidoscopic sequence of video works triggered multiple reflections with this near-hypnotic, liminal state, but not as a form of detachment from reality. Instead, to access a deeper level of memory, desire, knowledge and action. In dialogue with the wider thematic framework of Artissima, the exhibition explored dream images suspended between waking and sleeping, light and darkness, reality and its projection on the screen of the unconscious.

The collaboration between Intesa Sanpaolo and Artissima continued then at the fair with an original exhibition project that confirmed the value of this partnership. The Intesa Sanpaolo stand featured a series of photographic works by Olivo Barbieri, offering a preview of his upcoming exhibition in February 2025 as part of the Great Italian Photography event at Gallerie d’Italia-Torino. The photos by Barbieri, from the Intesa Sanpaolo collections, were presented in dialogue with three paintings from the bank’s art collection.