This post was originally published on artnews.com
Paris-based art dealer Philippe Jousse remembers when he first participated in the Turin-based fair Artissima a few years ago. “I went home with my pockets stuffed with business cards from curators,” he said, speaking from his current Artissima booth, which features an array of intriguing young, and emerging artists.
Held in Turin’s skylit Oval Lingotto in the foothills of the Alps, Artissima is Italy’s largest international contemporary art fair. With this year’s edition featuring a roster of 189 galleries, it packs a mighty punch in a city that boasts a history of high-net-worth residents, whose grandeur is reflected in the embellished, stone-arched walkways and impressive towers seen around town.
But the fair, which held its preview for this year’s edition yesterday, is not known for the ultra-pricey artworks that typically appear at Art Basel’s various events. Instead, dealers told ARTnews that Artissima was well-reputed for attracting curators, mainly ones from Italian and European institutions. Plus, the relatively affordable cost of booths, about half the price of what it takes to exhibit at fairs like Art Basel or Frieze, allowed smaller galleries to experiment with lesser-known artists and provide them with greater exposure.
Artissima director Luigi Fassi told ARTnews that about 50 curators from international institutions, many of them based in Italy, were involved with the fair in an “official capacity.” These curators participated in the fair’s programming, with some 35 of them serving on juries for the 11 total prizes and initiatives awarded at the fair. Additionally, Turin’s Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT is endowed with an acquisition budget for artworks purchased at the fair for its own collection, which it loans on long term to two local museums: the GAM – Galleria Civica di Arti Moderna di Torino and the Castello di Rivoli. Those two institutions purchased more than $400,000 worth of art within the fair’s first day.
Dealers, Fassi said, “are very vocal in saying that for them, having curators come is as key as having collectors come.”
In today’s slower art market climate, dealers said that Artissima’s focus on exposure to institutions, as well as the fair’s relatively lower pricepoints and its more relaxed atmosphere, hit all the right notes.
Artissima “is a fair where you can take more time talking to clients, which fits with the current market, when building relationships and working together with clients is so important,” said Alex Mor, cofounder of the Paris-based gallery Mor Charpentier.
By midday yesterday, co-director of Turin’s Galleria Franco Noero, Stefano De Gregori, said the show was teeming with curators from European institutions. But De Gregori, whose gallery has been participating in Artissima since the 1990s, said the fair was equally important for serving emerging artists. “If you want to discover something new, this is the place,” De Gregori said.
With that in mind, the fair’s grande dame and leading patron, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a regular on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, said she hopes the fair encourages younger generations to begin collecting. “You can buy good works that are not so expensive, and you can begin to create an amazing collection,” she explained, adding that Turin has long history of art patrons.
The fair, she continued, is a product of Turin’s public and private collaborative effort. The Artissima brand is owned by local public entities—the region, city, and province—but it is co-financed by corporate partnerships who pay for those prizes and awards, as well as exhibitor fees. This alleviates some of the pressure that can come with corporate-run alternatives to sell booths.
Indeed, the fair is historically directed by curators. The fair hosts three curated sections, one spotlighting emerging artists, another for under-recognized historic figures, and a Disegni section for works on paper. In addition to the invited jury members, curators also participate in guided walks throughout the fair that are accompanied by a top collector. Those events are called Walkie Talkies, and they can be viewed online.
Helena Kritis, chief curator at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, told ARTnews that she was thrilled to accept the fair’s invitation to do a Walkie Talkie alongside art collector Kwong Yee Leong, founder of the experimental exhibition space Blank Canvas in Malaysia. She said it not only gave her a chance to revisit artworks by the likes of Simnikiwe Buhlungu, a former Wiels artist in residence, but also to scout for artists whom she’d like to work with in future.
Artissima’s focus on curators does serve a commercial purpose, according to Fassi. Bringing top-quality institutional directors—this year’s included ones from the Kunsthalle Zurich, the Serpentine Galleries, and major Italian museums—is “a market priority” that brings greater visibility to artists via institutional recognition, he said. “That would also obviously benefit the market.”
This could be seen playing out at Import Export’s booth, which was devoted to the Polish Constructivist artist Teresa Żarnowerówna. Import Export’s director Sonia Jakimczyk said the gallery had been eager to return to Artissima for a second time, due to the all the curators that attend and the fair’s reputation for spotlighting historic works by under-recognized artists. At last year’s fair, “we connected with many collectors and museum curators, so we knew that it was going to be the right fit for us,” said Jakimczyk. On Artissima’s first day, institutions from across Europe had shown strong interest in several of Żarnowerówna’s paintings on paper, which float between surrealist figuration and total abstraction. A number of pieces were reserved or had waitlists.
Elsewhere, at Martins & Montero, gallery co-owner Maria Montero presented rare works by Brazilian artist Juraci Dórea. The artist was known for creating sculptures, often using leather and tree branches, to be exhibited for the benefit of a community living in the stark, desert-like conditions of the Bahia hinterlands. Dórea then placed his structures resembling strange tipis, as well as figurative paintings with a folkloric aesthetic, in and around the community living there, who often became involved in the art making itself. Many of these works have disintegrated or have been lost, with only documentary photographs remaining. “What you see here is probably everything that there is,” said Montero, pointing to the booth, which features works made in the 1970s and 1980s.
That’s one reason the gallery is particularly eager to place the works, priced between €5,000 and €45,000 (about $5,5400 and $49,000), with institutions.
Gallery Gramma Epsilon from Athens showed works by women artists, many of whom worked with textiles. The gallery dubbed its booth “The Different Revolution,” to highlight the ulterior ways women were rebelling on the periphery of male-led demonstrations movements during the 20th century. Though they didn’t want to protest in the streets, these artists were “asking the same things” as demonstrators, said gallery cofounder Francesco Romano Petilllo. The artists wanted “the freedom to be artists, but at the same time, mothers and wives.” The booth is essentially a preview for Gramma Epsilon’s upcoming exhibition under the same name, opening November 12.
Petillo said Artissima is one of his favorite fairs because it is less commerce-oriented. “You have collectors come, but also, curators and museum directors always come. Plus, Turin has been working to reinvent itself as a center for culture,” he added.
A survey of what’s on view around the city confirms this: the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has 30 years’ worth of art by Mark Manders, and the Pinacoteca Agnelli, set within the former headquarters of the car company Fiat, is debuting an exhibition of Salvo’s paintings.
Coming on the heels of Frieze in London and Art Basel Paris, there was initially speculation among dealers at Artissima that slightly fewer people had attended the fair than in prior years. An Artissima spokesperson, however, said that attendance from international visitors was on par with previous editions so far, and that the fair “attracts a different collector base to Art Basel and Frieze, so we don’t consider ourselves competitors.”
But some art-world leaders agreed that going to all three fairs was overkill. Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, might be one of them. Speaking to ARTnews at a sumptuous dinner held in the art-filled home of Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, he exclaimed: “I didn’t go to Frieze, and I didn’t go to Art Basel Paris, so I came to Artissima in Turin! And I love it.”