As autumn light settled over Turin, Artissima Art Fair once again became the epicentre of the Italian contemporary art scene. In its 32nd edition, the fair confirmed its reputation as a place to capture contemporary dynamics and international ambitions, bringing together artists, curators, and collectors for four days of vibrant exchange. Artissima is more than just an art fair as it remains a laboratory of ideas, where artistic experimentation meets cultural reflection.
Under the direction of Luigi Fassi, this year’s edition drew conceptual inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s Instructions for Spaceship Earth, inviting participants to reconsider creativity and responsibility within a shared global ecosystem. The theme resonated across the fair’s presentations, framing art as a means of imagining more sustainable, interconnected futures.
Featuring 176 galleries from 36 countries, Artissima balanced its trademark experimental spirit with the evolving dynamics of the Italian art market (currently adapting to the newly implemented 5% VAT rate on artworks in Italy). The Main Section presented established international galleries, while Monologue/Dialogue offered a focused look at compelling solo and duo projects. New Entries injected fresh perspectives from emerging spaces, and Art Spaces & Editions highlighted the creativity of prints and multiples. Present Future illuminated forward-thinking practices shaping contemporary discourse, while Back to the Future celebrated visionary artists active between the 1940s and 1990s. Finally, Drawings paid homage to the immediacy and intimacy of works on paper.
Below we present a subjective selection of the highlights from the fair.
Galerija Asni
Among the fair’s standout presentations, Galerija Asni from Riga, Latvia, captured the attention with the poignant, nuanced work of Agate Tūna, a multidisciplinary artist who approaches photography as both a tangible craft and a metaphysical exploration. Utilising analogue and experimental methods such as chemigrams, Tūna creates images that combine craftsmanship, scenographic precision, and tactile sensitivity.
Her compositions – from performative self-portraits to carefully arranged still lifes – operate at the intersection of spirituality and technology through a distinctly feminine lens. Drawing on her family’s spiritual heritage and addressing themes of hauntology, quartz crystals, and technospectra, Tūna’s perspective conceptualises photography as a “haunted medium”: one that captures echoes of the past while simultaneously visualising the contours of a speculative future.
Ciaccia Levi
Under the banner of Ciaccia Levi, a Paris-Milan gallery, Garance Früh and Kenny Dunkan came together in a dialogue of transformation, hybridity, and resilience, with each artist exploring the boundaries between body, material, and identity through distinct yet interconnected practices.
Garance Früh’s sculptural works engage in an art of disguise, where organic forms emerge through imitation and transformation. Using black leather, stretched canvas, and skeletal armatures, Früh evokes skin, bone, and muscle – creating hybrid bodies that question what is natural, what is constructed, and how protection can also imply exposure. Kenny Dunkan extends this conversation through assemblages and collages that bring together fragments of identity, culture, and material. His installations weave symbols and textures into layered compositions, reflecting a self that is both multiple and mutable. Like Früh, Dunkan explores transformation, yet his focus lies in the interplay between the spiritual and the material, the personal and the collective.
Together, their collaboration at the fair forms a shared terrain where transformation, hybridity, and resilience intersect. Früh’s sculptural skins and Dunkan’s symbolic mutations converge in an ecosystem of material experimentation and poetic resistance – each artist amplifying the other’s voices in a collective reflection on what it means to be human, layered, and in flux.
ChertLüdde
ChertLüdde Gallery returned to Artissima with works by many talented artists. However, Selma Selman, Kasia Fudakowski, and Clemen Parrocchetti particularly stood out.
Fudakowski’s multidisciplinary practice – encompassing design, sculpture, film, performance, and writing – uses playful, sculptural experimentation to question social norms and the absurdity of binary thinking. Parrocchetti (1923-2016), a long-overlooked artist, evolved from exploring Classical mythology through textiles to examining the animal world and social relationships from a feminist perspective. Selman, meanwhile, investigates body and identity within social and political contexts; her painted car hoods depicting Roma women as community “motherboards” reveal the often-invisible structures of strength and care.
Overall, the presentation highlighted artists who engage critically with identity, mythology, and social systems, each offering a distinct lens on how bodies, materials, and narratives shape our cultural understanding.
Ada Project
Rome-based Ada Project presented a tightly conceived dialogue between Lulù Nuti and Alicja Pakosz, whose practices investigate material tension and emotional endurance through distinct yet complementary approaches.
Lulù Nuti exhibited a group of sculptures that merge construction materials – steel rods, cement, and wire mesh – with organic matter, including soil and vegetal fragments. Her sinuous, quasi-biomorphic forms seem to twist and breathe within their metal casings, creating forms that engage in sensitive dialogue with their surroundings. By combining industrial rigidity with gestures of fragility, Nuti examines the uneasy coexistence of organic structures and natural processes. The works carry a tactile awareness of weight and resistance, translating ecological anxiety into physical matter.
Alicja Pakosz, in turn, presented paintings that approach human behaviour through a psychological lens. Her compositions evoke visceral emotional states – fight, flight, freeze, and friendship – rendered through densely worked surfaces and subdued tonal shifts. The figures, often caught in moments of hesitation or mutual care, express the precarious balance between instinct and empathy. Placed in proximity, Nuti’s metallic organisms and Pakosz’s charged portraits established a dialogue between material constraint and emotional exposure. Their juxtaposition foregrounded the body – its tensions, impulses, and vulnerabilities – as both a site of confrontation and connection.
Cable Depot
Representing Bulgarian Cable Depot Gallery, Liz Elton showcased ethereal textile installations that examine cycles of waste, compost, and renewal. Her work, inspired by the Sofia Women’s Market – home to her representing gallery – transforms discarded and biodegradable materials into meditations on care, sustenance, and the environment. Elton’s large-scale pieces draw on traditions of landscape and still life, reimagined through materials such as compostable food waste bags, recycled textiles, silk, plant dyes, and vegetable seeds.
Some of these elements were sourced directly from the market; others were cultivated by the artist herself, weaving together themes of growth, decay, and regeneration. Using Google Maps and on-site research conducted in November 2024, Elton mapped the rhythms and spatial choreography of the market, interpreting it as a living ecosystem – a site where food, labour, and community circulate in tandem. Her installations, luminous and transient, evoke the cycles of nourishment and loss that underpin both human and ecological life.
Trotoar Gallery
Trotoar Gallery from Zagreb, Croatia, has been awarded the Artissima New Entries Fund Award 2025 for its presentation of Marko Tadić, curated by Marco Scotini. The prize, which supports emerging galleries participating in the Turin fair for the first time, aims to strengthen their presence and visibility on the international art scene. In the booth, Tadić’s work unfolds as a poetic archaeology of memory. His practice identifies the dead remnants of history – not as static relics, but as active materials charged with the potential for reinterpretation. Through the reuse and transformation of found objects such as postcards, maps, slides, notebooks, and personal photographic archives, Tadić builds a visual language that bridges past and present.
These modest fragments are reassembled into scenographic, almost cinematic compositions, where traces of collective memory coexist with personal reflection. In Tadić’s hands, the archive becomes a site of invention: a space where what has been forgotten can be reimagined, and where history itself becomes a material for storytelling. Trotoar Gallery’s presentation, marked by conceptual precision and understated emotion, underscores the gallery’s commitment to thoughtful, research-driven practices – offering a compelling example of how small institutions can shape meaningful dialogues within today’s global art landscape.
Anton Janizewski
At this year’s fair, Berlin’s Anton Janizewski Gallery captured attention with an extraordinary presentation by Rebekka Benzenberg, Ferdinand Dölberg, and Marc Henry. Their works formed a subtle yet powerful dialogue about materiality, identity, and the construction of reality.
Rebekka Benzenberg’s sculptural installations, one of which featured a body wrapped in silicone foil placed centrally, transformed the booth into an energetic spatial encounter. Using everyday materials, carrying social and cultural codes, the artist recontextualises them as “foreign bodies” in the exhibition space. Her works connect with and resist the surrounding architecture, creating a tension that blurs the boundaries between object, environment, and viewer. Ferdinand Dölberg turned inward, exploring issues of identity and social belonging. His mask-like figures and distorted anatomies explore the fragility of identity and shifting gender roles. In his expressive paintings and drawings, individuality is both questioned and enacted – in a theatre of human emotion and ambiguity.
Meanwhile, Marc Henry explored the malleability of reality in the post-factual era. Moving between digital manipulation and painterly gesture, he constructs visual narratives from personal archives, online images, and 3D renders. The result is a body of work that oscillates between virtuality and reality, revealing how memory and fiction intertwine in contemporary image culture. Together, the three artists created a conversation about transformation – of matter, self, and perception. The presentation was distinguished by its conceptual coherence and emotional resonance.
Galerie Leovenbruck
Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, presented Chloé Royer in the Present Future section of the fair. Through her transformation of materials, Royer explores the latent potential for metamorphosis within all bodies – living or inanimate. Her works play with balance and tension, inventing postures that seem improbable yet persist through contact, friction, and gestures of repair and care. Royer’s biomorphic sculptures – hybrid, chimeric forms assembled from fragments and remnants – occupy a space between the organic and the artificial.
They resist classification, challenging established taxonomies and destabilising our perception of what constitutes the living or the inert. An intimate dialogue unfolds among the different elements of her compositions, and between the works and their viewers. Royer invites a sensorial, almost carnal encounter with matter – one that blurs identities, tames strangeness, and transforms the unfamiliar into something deeply human.
Meno Parkas
Artissima welcomed back Lithuanian artists Žilvinas Landzbergas and Patricija Jurkšaitytė, joined by debuting talents Dalia Truskaitė and Simona Žemaitytė, whose works collectively reflected the Meno Parkas Gallery’s focus on conceptual materialism and subtle disruption.
Žilvinas Landzbergas, who represented Lithuania at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), transforms everyday materials – horns, branches, light, and wood – into installations that merge the organic with the symbolic. Patricija Jurkšaitytė reimagines Renaissance and Baroque interiors, removing human figures to probe painting as both memory and erasure, questioning how meaning is constructed and undone.
Debuting at the fair, Dalia Truskaitė, winner of the Gold Prize at the Toyama International Glass Triennial (2024), presented delicate glass installations balancing fragility and precision. Simona Žemaitytė, awarded a special mention at LOOP Barcelona 2024, explored human labour through cinematic video works that combine documentary clarity with poetic reflection. Together, the four artists offered a compelling presentation where material, image, and concept intersected, creating a dialogue on perception, memory, and transformation.
Contemporary Lynx was a proud media partner of Artissima 2025.
