Artissima Fair 2017

Artissima will open to the public from 3 to 5 November 2017, for the first time under the guidance of Ilaria Bonacossa. The Fondazione Spinola will make the work by Manuele Cerutti available for the new exhibition project.

Recognised on an international level for its attention to experimental practices and for its ability to reinvent itself at every edition, in 2017 the fair introduces a series of novelties right across its programme and its composition: as well as the new ‘Disegni’ (‘Drawings’) section, the renewed team of curators and the innovative digital platform announced recently, Artissima has in fact been enhanced by new ideas and specific initiatives: a special exhibition project, the ‘Deposito d’Arte Italiana Presente’ (‘Deposit of Current Italian Art’), an innovative programme of talks, a new name behind the display project of the fair pavilion, curated by the studio Vudafieri Saverino Partners of Milan.

The new display project
Curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and Vittoria Martini, the ‘Deposito d’Arte Italiana Presente’ is Artissima’s new cultural display project dedicated to Italian art. The Deposito will host prestigious loans from Piedmontese institutions and works from private collections across the territory, together with a number of works of the galleries featured in the fair, acknowledging the key role they have played (and continue to do) in the production of the history of contemporary art in this country. For this new project, Artissima drew inspiration from the most innovative exhibition experiences of 1960s Turin, at a time of great artistic vitality: the Deposito d’Arte Presente (1967–68) was “an extemporary, non-permanent collection […] a space for the present, for a kind of art connected to the hic et nunc and stripped of any form of sacredness.” With the ‘Deposito d’Arte Italiana Presente’, Artissima picks up on that format, translating it into modern terms and using it as a conceptual frame for a project that adopts its way of working. Thus, the Deposito is not a show, but a dynamic exhibition space as well as one of investigation from which to set out on a narrative of Italian art of the last 20 years, so as to take a snapshot of it today with a view to foreseeing its future developments.