Torino Artscape is Artissima’s column highlighting current exhibitions in the city’s leading contemporary art institutions: a regular feature offering a glimpse into the most compelling exhibition programs, curatorial visions, and artistic expressions that animate Turin’s contemporary art scene. Torino Artscape invites you to explore Turin as an essential destination for art lovers, offering inspiration and cultural enrichment throughout the year.
This new episode is dedicated to GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino.
Lisetta Carmi. Erotismo e autoritarismo a Staglieno
Up to 1.11.2026
A reclining figure emerges from the whiteness of marble at the centre of the room, while the still gazes of Lisetta Carmi’s photographs unfold across the violet walls. Around them, the hushed silence of the installation intensifies the tension between eros and death, between the sensuality of sculpted bodies and the fixity of images taken in the monumental cemetery of Staglieno. It is a measured yet deeply dense dialogue, in which photography seems to draw close to sculptural matter, almost inheriting its funerary breath.
The exhibition Lisetta Carmi. Eroticism and Authoritarianism at Staglieno, curated by Elena Volpato and on view until 1 November 2026 on the second floor of the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Torino, presents a group of fifteen photographs recently acquired by the museum through the Strategia Fotografia 2025 project promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Created between 1966 and 1976, the images belong to Carmi’s celebrated series dedicated to the Staglieno cemetery, a place the photographer approaches as an ambiguous space, suspended between bourgeois monumentality and restrained desire.
Born in Genoa in 1924, Lisetta Carmi developed one of the most radical photographic practices of postwar Italy, constantly working at the margins of social and visual conventions. In the photographs on display, details of funerary sculptures — hands, faces, draperies, female bodies and angelic figures — are isolated through close framings that intensify both the sensual and authoritarian dimensions evoked by the title of the series. The dialogue with four sculptures from the GAM collections, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, goes beyond a simple formal comparison: it opens instead onto a reflection on the relationship between image and memory, between the sculpted body and the photographed one, where photography, as Roland Barthes suggested, continues to preserve a profound connection with death.
Giorgio Griffa. Omaggio per i 90 anni
Up to 1.11.2026
On the occasion of the of the new exhibition season at the GAM, several rooms in the permanent collections have also been redesigned. Among them, one room is dedicated to the work of Giorgio Griffa, a central figure in contemporary pictorial research.
The works on display document some of the key stages in Griffa’s artistic investigation beginning in the late 1960s, when the artist initiated a radical reflection on the language of painting. His work is distinguished by a practice that gives the pictorial gesture a process-oriented and open-ended dimension: signs, lines, and fields of color unfold across raw canvas according to essential rhythms, revealing the temporality of execution and embracing incompletion as a structural principle. In dialogue with the analytical and conceptual research of the second half of the twentieth century, his painting emerges as an investigation into the making of the image, in which the surface becomes a space of relationship between rule and variation, order and possibility.
Vincenzo Agnetti. Oggi è un secolo
Up to 1.11.2026
A black surface, apparently compact, is incised by subtle marks that allow figures, geometries and luminous traces to re-emerge. In Vincenzo Agnetti’s photographic works, the image is not captured but extracted from darkness through a slow, material, almost archaeological gesture. The result is a photography that seems to deny itself in order to move closer to drawing, writing and painting.
On view until 1 November 2026 at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Torino, Vincenzo Agnetti. Today Is a Century, curated by Chiara Bertola with Virginia Lupo, celebrates the centenary of the birth of one of the most radical figures of Italian conceptual art in the second half of the twentieth century. The exhibition begins with Photo-graffia (1980), recently acquired by the GAM collections, and brings together a selection of works created between the 1970s and 1980s devoted to experimentation with the photographic medium.
After years of research centred on language and its mechanisms, Agnetti enters here a different phase of his work, in which gesture once again becomes central. His blackened and subsequently scratched films transform photography into a surface to be incised, altered and traversed. In the Vetrate as well, where interior and exterior seem to constantly merge, there emerges a desire to destabilise the habitual functioning of the photographic image. Rather than producing visions, Agnetti seems instead to question what in the image remains hidden, suspended between erasure and appearance.
An Alternative 20th Century: Works on Paper from the GAM Collections
Up to 1.11.2026
A constellation of sheets runs through the rooms of the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Torino: small pencil studies, rapid watercolours, meticulous engravings, collages and calligraphic marks that seem to preserve the very moment of invention. In some display cases, almost private notes can be glimpsed; elsewhere, geometries, figures, pop fragments and abstract visions burst forth.
The exhibition An Alternative 20th Century: Works on Paper from the GAM Collections, curated by Fabio Cafagna and Elena Volpato and on view until 1 November 2026 at the GAM Torino, brings together more than six hundred works from the museum’s collections, tracing a path across the entire twentieth century, from Symbolist and Secessionist atmospheres to the research of the 1990s. More than a simple chronological sequence, the exhibition creates the impression of entering the moving laboratory of the last century, where paper becomes the freest site of artistic experimentation. Drawings, engravings, temperas and watercolours thus compose a body of works rarely visible on this scale, capable of offering a new perspective both on twentieth-century art history and on the very collecting identity of the GAM.
Throughout a century marked by wars, avant-gardes and continuous revolutions in language, paper established itself as a privileged space for experimentation and thought. It is here that artists note down intuitions, test forms, and allow revisions and obsessions to emerge. The exhibition thus places very different bodies of work in dialogue: the refined Symbolist inquietude of Leonardo Bistolfi and Gustav Klimt, the Futurist experiments of Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni, the diaristic sheets of Filippo de Pisis, the abstractions of Fausto Melotti, up to the Pop incursions of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Mario Schifano. Equally central is the presence of Lucio Fontana, whose drawings reveal the germinal character of his spatial thinking, just as the works of Carol Rama, Giuseppe Penone and Giulio Paolini show how, in the second half of the century, the sheet increasingly became a border territory between gesture, writing, image and space.
Pesce Khete.The intruder
Up to 1.11.2026
Among the twentieth-century works on paper, rearing horses, broken lines, fields of colour held together by adhesive tape and figures that seem to emerge from the sheet only to disappear immediately afterwards suddenly appear. Pesce Khete’s works interrupt the historical rhythm of the collection with the naturalness of an infiltration: they do not occupy a separate space, but slip in among Fontana, Savinio and Spazzapan, producing visual short circuits and unexpected continuities.
On view until 1 November 2026 at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Torino, THE INTRUDER. Pesce Khete accompanies the exhibition An Alternative 20th Century: Works on Paper from the GAM Collections as part of the Fourth Resonance programme. Invited by Elena Volpato to engage with the museum’s graphic collections, the Roman artist creates a discreet yet unsettling intervention, capable of setting the reading of the collections back into motion.
Among Italian artists of his generation, Pesce Khete has made paper his privileged medium. In his works, drawing, painting, revisions, tears and “stitches” coexist within a practice that alternates sudden gestural accelerations with rigorous compositional attention. The sheet thus becomes an unstable space, where white acts as pause and silence, while colour and line continuously reopen the possibility of the image. Rather than simply entering the museum galleries, the Intruder seems to inhabit their cracks, destabilising the chronological order and suggesting new trajectories between works of the past and those of the present.
– Testo di Guia Agazzi