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 the new program of Pinacoteca Agnelli.
Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company
Up to 13.09.2026
A cat cries out from the middle of a fur pelt, a bowl set before it and encircled by leaves, as if part of a pagan offering. Nearby, in black and white, a young man crouches on the edge of a sink with his legs raised—a gymnast balanced on an improbable apparatus. Elsewhere, a face disappears behind two champagne flutes, green eyes gazing through the golden fizz, a smile that never falters. Three photographs among many, yet enough to enter Walter Pfeiffer’s world, where every image seems to emerge from an encounter that is at once accidental and meticulously composed, and where the absurd, desire and everyday life coexist without hierarchy.
Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company, curated by Nicola Trezzi and Simon Castets, is the first institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to the Swiss artist (Beggingen, 1946). On view at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin until 13 September 2026, it brings together more than one hundred colour and black-and-white photographs spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The exhibition traces six decades of a pioneering practice that anticipated the visual languages of both fashion and social media, while remaining steadfastly committed to a deliberately cultivated imperfection.
Trained as a window dresser and graphic designer in Zurich, Pfeiffer builds his images through relationships rather than poses: friends, passers-by, cats, souvenirs and top models all become co-protagonists in an ongoing, open-ended performance. The exhibition unfolds across six thematic galleries—from the Swiss glamour of his early work to the anti-heroism of his later series—where queer desire, chromatic formalism and self-irony coexist with remarkable ease. Flash photography, accumulated patterns and the structure of the diptych become the tools of a highly distinctive visual language that has, over time, become a pervasive yet rarely acknowledged aesthetic reference. Looking at these photographs today—of bodies and objects, skin and kitsch, athleticism and languor—is like recognising a language you never realised you already knew.
Pista 500
The wind arrives before the gaze. It sets a row of flags along the façade of the Lingotto in motion and draws the eye towards the void of the spiral ramp, where a sequence of small carriages seems to have lost any possibility of movement. At the Pista 500 of Pinacoteca Agnelli, once again this year, art does not simply occupy a space: it reshapes its rhythm, its path, and the way it is traversed.
From 30 April 2026, Bandiere per Zefiro by Nathalie Du Pasquier and ADDITION, SUBTRACTION, MULTIPLICATION by Peter Fischli join the permanent programme of the Pista 500, alongside the interventions already installed on the former FIAT test track on the roof of the Lingotto.
Designed for the eastern façade of the building, Du Pasquier’s installation entrusts the completion of the work to the wind: fifteen flags with geometric patterns turn colour into a shifting element, in constant dialogue with the architecture and the surrounding landscape. Fischli, on the other hand, intervenes in the vertical space of the ramp by suspending and overturning a series of carriages inspired by tourist road trains, altering their function and interrupting the idea of a linear route. Two radically different interventions that share the ability to activate the Lingotto as a site of relation, inviting viewers to look anew at a space once devoted to industry and now dedicated to culture.
Modigliani Sottopelle. Quattro capolavori
Up to 13.09.2026
Nu couché by Amedeo Modigliani stands watch in the dim light of the Scrigno at Pinacoteca Agnelli: an elongated body against a dark background, arms resting gently at its sides, the head reclining on a pile of cushions. The gallery lighting brings out the richness of its painted surface, its warm palette, and the line—at once sinuous and precise—that has made this nude one of the most celebrated of the twentieth century. Opposite, a wall panel reveals what the naked eye cannot see: the warp and weft of the canvas, the hidden traces of a work that scientific research has repositioned within a new chronology.
Modigliani sottopelle. Quattro capolavori, curated by Pietro Rigolo and Beatrice Zanelli, is the fifth chapter of Pinacoteca Agnelli’s Beyond the Collection programme, on view in the Scrigno until 13 September 2026. The exhibition places Nu couché—acquired by Giovanni and Marella Agnelli in 1960—in dialogue with three other masterpieces by the artist: Female Nude Reclining on a White Pillow (Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), and, on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Portrait of Gaston Modot and Maternité.
The exhibition stems from an interdisciplinary research project involving art historians, conservators and scientists. By applying algorithmic analysis to the density of the canvas’s warp and weft threads, researchers have been able to reconstruct three rolls of canvas used by Modigliani between 1917 and 1919 and establish that several works originated from the same support. The result is a proposed new dating for Nu couché: traditionally placed between 1917 and 1918, it is now attributed to the years 1918–1919, during the artist’s stay in the south of France—a period in which his painting became more fluid, warmer in palette, and more assured in its treatment of volume. More than a simple revision of a date, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the final trajectory of Modigliani’s artistic practice.
– Text by Guia Agazzi