Gallery of Contemporary Art in Turin

Brief Information

Turin’s civic collection began earlier than the current building itself: in 1863, it became Italy’s first public museum of what was then contemporary art. GAM is therefore important not only for its selection of works from the 19th and 20th centuries, but also for the very shift toward treating the art of its own time as a museum subject.

The current building appeared after a rupture in the history of the site. The old pavilion on Corso Siccardi, where the collection was housed from 1895 to 1942, was destroyed during the bombing of the Second World War. After the war, a new museum building by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti, opened in 1959, was built on the same plot. So the museum literally stands on the site of a lost exhibition space.

What to Notice First

At GAM, it is worth looking not only at individual works, but also at how the museum arranges them. The modern art collection occupied the first two floors of the new building: this emphasizes that the postwar structure was designed as a functioning museum space, not as an incidental storage facility.

An important detail is the change in the logic of the display. In 2009, works stopped being shown simply by date of creation and were arranged by themes: “View,” “Genre,” “Beginning,” and “Distinctiveness.” New sections appeared later. This changes the way the galleries are read: works may appear side by side not because they are close in date, but because they are connected by an idea. Another layer is visible in the composition of the collection: paintings, sculptures, installations, and video art show how the museum expanded the very notion of contemporary art from familiar objects to media and spatial works.