Fifteen new contemporary works for the collections of Turin's GAM and Castello di Rivoli

The CRT Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art has acquired fifteen new works by nine contemporary artists-Jacopo Benassi, Merlin James, Atelier dell’Errore, Chiara Camoni, Alessandra Spranzi, Bill Lynch, Giuseppe Gabellone, Cooking Sections, and Richard Bell.

The new acquisitions, as well as the Foundation’s entire collection, are on free loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino and made available to the public.

“Acquisitions are a fundamental part of the activities of the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, which today boasts a collection of excellence that is internationally recognized and made available to the entire community as a common good,” said Massimo Lapucci, Secretary General of Fondazione CRT.

The works acquired are chosen by the directors of the museums to which they are destined, according to criteria of consistency with their own collections and shared with the Foundation’s Scientific Committee, composed of Rudi Fuchs, as Honorary Chairman, Sir Nicholas Serota, President Arts Council England, Manuel Borja-Villel, former Director Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Francesco Manacorda, Independent Curator - London, and Beatrix Ruf, Director Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam. The collection allows the two outstanding museum institutions a continuous updating of their exhibitions, made truly contemporary by the constant dialogue with the current art scene and its artists.

“With the recent acquisitions, the Foundation consolidates its collaboration with Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, enriching their permanent collections with significant works and feeding their important program of temporary exhibitions and international exchanges. The curatorial proposals, corroborated by the authority of the Foundation’s scientific committee, have stimulated the purchase of works capable of implementing the collections already on display, but also of opening them up to new themes, such as the environment, supporting the museums’ commitment to always being a mirror of contemporaneity,” commented Luisa Papotti, President of Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT.

The works intended for exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art:

U Can’t Touch This, by Richard Bell

Australian Aboriginal artist and political activist, Richard Bell (Charleville, Queensland, 1953) is the creator of the work U Can’t Touch This, which takes its cue from a famous photograph taken during the Commonwealth Games in 1982; the particularly expressive depiction uses citation and appropriation of European painting styles to address issues of authorship and intellectual ownership of ideas, which the artist believes are ignored in regard to Australian Aboriginal art. Bell reuses informal and Pop Art techniques in a collage that overturns stereotypes attributed to indigenous people.

Salmon: A Red Herring, by Cooking Sections.

An art duo founded by artists Daniel Fernandez Pascual and Alon Schwabe in 2013, Cooking Sections signs the multimedia work entitled Salmon: A Red Herring (2020), which starts with the color salmon to question its use in intensive salmon farming and, more generally, the use of color in the business of farming and ranching; the work was first exhibited at London’s Tate Britain in 2020 as part of a movement to boycott salmon farming. The members of Cooking Sections are by far the most prominent young artists internationally, active in an aesthetic renewal capable of countering climate change.

The works intended for exhibition at GAM - Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art:

POLLICE, another dark god of AdE, by Atelier dell’Errore

Atelier dell’Errore is a collective of young artists in their 20s suffering from various neurological diseases, led by Artistic Director Luca Santiago Mora, who founded the group initially within the health service and then transformed it into a work cooperative that enables young people to support themselves.POLLICE, another dark god of AdE (2021) is among the most important pieces in the series dedicated to red and gold; the style is the result of the overlapping of signs obsessively repeated by the designers, with surprising technical precision, on a particularly hostile surface. The image returns the profile of a creature that cannot be easily classified, at the crossroads between the body, torn and decomposed, of an animal and the features of a metamorphic god.

Panorama of La Spezia, by Jacopo Benassi

Jacopo Benassi (La Spezia, 1970) comes from years of work in photography and underground music, which has allowed him to develop a personal photographic style in which depth of field is eliminated and the aggressive flash light becomes the hallmark. The work in question is the result of an artistic residency spent between temporary wooden walls, inside a room in which he locked himself for more than a month, then sawed off into different parts before the inauguration; the work is one of the corners of the room, on the walls of which are exhibited works resulting from a reflection on the natural environment of the Gulf of La Spezia, accrochage of photographs and paintings, held together by car tie-rods, that relate nighttime photos of the Gulf, with their strongly contrasted images, and a traditional painting reminiscent of views typical of nineteenth-century local art.

Serpentess, by Chiara Camoni

Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974) has for years been conducting work dedicated to the interweaving of natural elements and cultural traditions of female, mythological and Mediterranean matrix, anticipating that strand of research that today has internationally taken on the name of ecofeminism. Serpentess (2020) is one of her most iconic works, central to her most recent international exhibitions, evoking the iconography of the serpent in art and mythology: from Hecate, a female chthonic deity with the body of a snake, to Medusa, her daughter, from Lilith, a serpentine woman depicted by Paolo Uccello clinging to the tree of genesis, to the archetypal serpentine nymph, which Warburg spoke of. Her body is carved by Chiara Camoni from a single branch of mimosa and painted with verdigris.

Buildings, Trees, Water and Under Stairs, by Merlin James

A painter and writer, Merlin James (Cardiff, 1960) makes a lucid and timely contribution to thinking about painting, as much in his artwork as in his texts. His output comprises exclusively small and medium-sized works, perennially poised between depiction and abstraction, between image and questioning the nature of the image itself. Buildings, Trees, Water (2021) and Under Stairs (1996) account for two different moments in the artist’s journey, but also for the great ideational coherence of his evolution: Buildings, Trees, Water includes physical elements in its composition, such as a seam in the canvas and a hole in its surface, which represent the constant contradiction between illusionistic possibilities and the reality of painting; in Under Stairs, on the other hand, multiple possibilities of meaning emerge from the inconsistency between figuration and abstraction.

Still Life with Chinese Painting and Merry Christmas My Love, by Bill Lynch

Bill Lynch (Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1960 - Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 2013) was a painter and artist aware of art history and an assiduous frequenter of museums devoted to the art of past centuries, whose works maintain a constant dialogue with Chinese painting. Painted in oil on wood, like much of the artist’s output, Still Life with Chinese Painting clearly shows how to recognize the completely revamped yet familiar Italian tradition in Lynch’s paintings, in terms of brushwork, the emergence of the support material, composition and iconographic references; similarly Merry Christmas My Love, painted in oil on an upholstery mounted on wood, relates to a different tradition of painting, incorporating textiles within the work.

Hanging tablecloth (The whole is black) - Egg shells eaten by a marten (The whole is black) - Plate 51. Sedum species (Cacti and other succulents) - Plate 62. Kleinia tomentosa (Cacti and other succulents) and Plate 35. Rhipsalis salicornioides (Cacti and other succulents), by Alessandra Spranzi

Professor of Photography at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Alessandra Spranzi (Milan, 1962) is a leading figure in the field of photography, whose artistic research is linked to the staging of the image, the reuse of her own and others’ shots, contact film impressions and the artist’s book. Some images take on an iconic force in his work and return as a compositional matrix, over and over again, through the years: the objects photographed on the plane change, but follow the same arrangement. The five works in question stage the mystery of the image that emerges, either by erasure or by superimposition of cut-out illustrations, so that the negative silhouette of a succulent plant offers itself as a frame to the page of an interior magazine. The nature of the superimposition brings out a perturbing character in the outdated appearance of old publication presentation codes, but it also triggers reflections on seminal figures in architecture such as Carlo Scarpa and the visionary nature of his scales.

KM 2.6, by Giuseppe Gabellone

Giuseppe Gabellone was one of the youngest protagonists of the artistic season of the 1990s and in particular of the Via Fiuggi Group in Milan. His research, on the borderline between sculpture and photography, has continued over the decades, achieving some of the most original results within these languages: KM 2,6 is a video work that represents for the artist “the beginning of everything” and one of the most relevant of those years in Italy: it shows the young Gabellone translating the time of the video, recorded on the magnetic tape by the video camera, into a large sculpture, composed of 2.6 kilometers of adhesive tape, reflecting the duration of the video tape, while the brown of the magnetic tape is replicated in the brown of the packing tape that the artist unrolls first inside a house and then all around the building, like a spider web composed of a long, uninterrupted graphic-sculptural sign, which accompanies the artist’s movement during the action. From that work begins in Gabellone’s production the thought of how to present sculpture and the space it encompasses and on which its form propagates not as a three-dimensional object but as two-dimensional photographic documentation. In some ways, the artist takes to extremes the suggestion of Medardo Rosso, who personally photographed his works by choosing a single point of view and highlighting the propagation of their movement in space and light, but Gabellone makes a definitive choice: he destroys his sculptures after photographing them, so that they exist only as a photograph and as volume in absence.

Image: Salmon: A Red Herring, by Cooking Sections.

Fifteen new contemporary works for the collections of Turin's GAM and Castello di Rivoli

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