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.
The second episode is dedicated to GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.
Linda Fregni Nagler. Anger Pleasure Fear
Up to 12.04.2026
Two long vitrines of nine meters each, hold 997 daguerreotypes, cartes de visite, and tintypes made between the 1840s and the 1920s, potraying very young children, often infants, cradled by mothers draped in dark fabrics like hidden presences withdrawn from the gaze and sensibility of the viewer. Arranged in clusters, these images reveal, at least in part, the role of women in society between the 19th and 20th centuries.
The installation The Hidden Mother, first shown at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, occupies a central room in Linda Fregni Nagler’s (Stockholm, 1976) exhibition Anger Pleasure Fear. This is the first Italian retrospective dedicated to the Swedish artist, curated by Cecilia Canziani, and will remain on view at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino until April 12, 2026.
By isolating and preserving fragments of the visible, Fregni Nagler reflects on the materiality of photography, weaving together collecting, research, and narrative. Her works testify not only to what they show, but also to the ways in which the world has been seen over time, becoming a space for reflection, memory, and imagination.
The exhibition unfolds across multiple photographic series created over more than twenty years, often from journalistic sources, where images are separated from their original context. Yet the most striking section is a previously unseen works conceived for this occasion, devoted to the Mensur, the ritual duels of German student fraternities: scars—marks of courage and belonging—become ambiguous traces of purposeless violence, a legacy that continues to challenge the present.
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Lothar Baumgarten. Culture–Nature
Unil 12.04.2026
In the subdued light of the Videotheque at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, visitors are immersed in the lush, breathing landscapes of Venezuela, between the Orinoco and Amazon River basins. The life of the indigenous Yãnomãmɨ community is revealed in a six‑chapter film by Lothar Baumgarten, the artist honored in the exhibition Culture Nature, curated by Chiara Bertola with Virginia Lupo, on view until April 12, 2026.
Baumgarten was one of the most significant figures in late 20th‑century conceptual art, celebrated for intertwining aesthetic investigation with anthropological and ecological reflection. Through photography, film, and installation, his work examines how cultures are observed, represented, and often misunderstood, bringing marginalized knowledge to light and questioning the Western gaze.
The exhibition traces key phases of his practice, focusing in particular on photography as a tool for observing and shaping reality. The Culture–Nature series (1968–1972), which gives the show its title, gathers ephemeral interventions made in open spaces, where natural elements and artistic gestures merge into temporary forms.
At the entrance, Arché greets the visitor as an example of fleeting sculpture. It evokes a Shapono—the traditional Yãnomãmɨ dwelling—covered in macaw feathers, highlighting one of Baumgarten’s central concerns.
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Nights. Five centuries of stars, dreams, plenilunes
Unil 12.04.2026
The outline of a naked, shivering body lies asleep beneath a riot of stars. A deep blue sky frames the Milky Way, its shine enhanced by oil on canvas. Felice Casorati’s 1914 work enters into dialogue with a hundred other pieces in Nights. Five centuries of stars, dreams, plenilunes, on view at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino until April 12, 2026. Curated by Fabio Cafagna and Elena Volpato, the exhibition traces the portrayal of the night in art from the early 17th century to the present.
Spanning fourteen rooms and organized into thematic clusters that follow an historical thread, the show reveals how night has long been a privileged space for artistic inquiry—where technical experimentation, close observation of reality, and poetic tension converge. The journey hinges on a constant oscillation between reason and feeling, making the nocturnal a liminal realm, suspended between knowledge and imagination.
The opening is marked by Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius (1610), whose celestial observations revolutionized the way we understand the sky. As visitors move through the rooms, they encounter shifts in artistic sensibility: from 19th-century vistas, where attention to reality intertwines with early Romantic impressions, to the suspended, uncanny atmospheres of the early 20th century.
Amid mythical and cosmic interpretations of the past century, the night becomes a metaphor for history itself and its most obscure moments. Works by Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso close the show, drawing the visitor into an intense, contemporary reflection, where the darkness of the sky mirrors that of human experience.
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Elisabetta Di Maggio. Frangibile
Unil 12.04.2026
Two majestic dragonfly wings, gleaming and golden, rise from the white wall, welcoming visitors to Frangibile, a sweeping retrospective of Elisabetta Di Maggio (Milan, 1964), curated by Chiara Bertola and Fabio Cafagna, hosted at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino until April 12, 2026.
Before these delicate, carved wings—apparently fragile yet made of galvanized steel—the enchantment is immediate: the precision and subtlety of her work seize and captivate the eye. Di Maggio herself writes: “Dragonfly wings have a membranous structure and their complex design reminds me of stained glass windows in cathedrals but also of the structural skeleton of a leaf.” Here, one notices the fine framework and the meticulous carving, unique features of her artistic language.
Her patient and delicate handcraft rooted in artisanal tradition—represent the foundation of her practice. Likewise, her dialogue with materials drives and push her to explore and transform them through an empirical, experimental approach. She studies, observes, and mimics nature so closely that she can describe her work as truly “organic.”
Across the six rooms of the exhibition, her pieces unfold as hand-engraved sheets of tissue paper, Marseille soaps carved like vast urban maps, glass mosaics and wax micromosaics poised on fragile, airy supports, and porcelain as thin as paper, balancing abstraction and figuration, natural and artificial.
Elisabetta Di Maggio contemplates nature and time, questioning our existence as fragile components of a larger system, suspended between beauty and precariousness.
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Davide Sgambaro. The Intruder
Unil 12.04.2026
Davide Sgambaro is the Intruder artist for this Terza Risonanza, who has been invited to engage in a dialogue with the current exhibition season at the GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Torino.
During each series of exhibitions, the intrusion of an artist or curator is necessary to disrupt the reassuring balance of the museum’s narrative, challenging its canonical chronological interpretation. This intrusion provides an opportunity to develop a personal vision of the museum’s exhibition space through unexpected interventions and fresh perspectives.
During this Risonanza, which will conclude on April 12, 2026, Davide Sgambaro presents two interventions: the first in a passageway on the second floor, the other inside the Sala del Riposo on the second floor.
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