At Artissima 2025, Torino’s legendary contemporary art fair transforms into a laboratory of ideas where global galleries, collectors, and dreamers gather under Buckminster Fuller’s cosmic motto, “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”. More than a marketplace, this year’s edition becomes a bold experiment in cultural diplomacy, aesthetics, and the future of Italy’s art economy.
The 32nd edition of Artissima, held from 31 October to 2 November 2025 at the Oval Lingotto in Torino, once again confirmed the fair’s vitality and its dual identity as both marketplace and cultural institution. With 176 galleries from 36 countries and more than 34000 visitors that flicked under the white industrial light like an orchestra tuning before the overture, Artissima 2025 reaffirmed its position as Italy’s most international contemporary art fair, as well as a space for ideas and debate. This year, it was also a fiscal experiment. The first major test ground for the Italy’s new 5% VAT rate on artworks, a fiscal reform that many Italian art professionals have long hoped for. Director Luigi Fassi described the fair as a “litmus test” for this policy and as an act of “cultural diplomacy”, showing how an art fair can participate in the broader European conversation. Art as ambassador, economy as language, and the fair as a stage where both learned to dance together again.
This year’s theme, Operating manual for Spaceship Earth, borrowed from Richard Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book, discussing humanity’s challenges and design revolution as a protentional for survival, set a reflective and forward-looking tone. It sounded utopian, but its execution was tactile, earthy, and slyly urgent. It invited visitors to consider art as a collective responsibility and a means of navigating the planet’s complex systems. Across the seven sections: Main Section, New Entries, Monologue/Dialogue, Art Spaces & Editions, Present Future, Back to the Future, and Disegni, the theme was translated into a curatorial landscape that oscillated between experimentation and awareness.
Many booths explicitly engaged with questions of sustainability, technology, and communication, while others explored more intimate themes of fragility and coexistence. Art here didn’t lecture. It reflected the world in materials. Ceramics that mimicked shell-like architecture, installations built from recycled circuit boards, digital works breathing besides canvases. Some artists explored the algorithmic sublime, others the fragile coexistence of bodies, species, or data. Sustainability, yes, but not the PR kind. This was sustainably as poetics, as resistance as a kind of tenderness.
Inside the Oval, the atmosphere was bright, open, and intensely energetic. Collectors, curators, and visitors moved through a labyrinth of colour and material diversity: bold installations met delicate works on paper, and digital pieces conversed with traditional painting. The mood was brisk but not rushed. There was money but also meaning. The fair’s balance of risk and rigour, combining the blue-chip establishment with the experimental thrill of the unknown, was repeatedly noted by critics. Booths took curatorial risks: some beautifully spare, others daringly dense, all together creating curated coherence, a quality increasingly rare in the marketplace masquerade of the global fair circuit. The selection of presented works ranged from Giuseppe Lana’s ceramics at Persano and sculpture by Guillermo Garcia Cruz at Atchugarry to Mario Merz and Mimmo Paladino at Biasutti & Biasutti and ML Fine Art, proof that Artissima still embraces both the avant-garde and historical modernism.
The curated sections pulsed stronger than ever, deepening the fair’s intellectual and experimental dimension. Present Future, dedicated to emerging artists, was a study in raw invention where materials argued and reconciled, where the organic met the industrial in a dance of friction. Back to the Future revisited post-war pioneers who explored communication and cybernetics from the 1940s to the 1990s, while Disegni reminded audiences of the immediacy and autonomy of drawing. The Fondazione Arte CRT Acquisition Fund of 300,000 euros was the most substantial in over a decade, adding 26 new works by 11 artists to the collections of GAM Torino and Castello di Rivoli. Prizes bloomed across the fair like secret handshakes: Louis Morlae claimed the illy Present Future Prize, Zoe Williams received the Carol Rama Prize. Thirteen artists left Torino heavier with recognition, lighter with sleep.
Outside the Oval, Artissima’s influence extended throughout Torino. Exhibitions and perfromances in museums and foundations formed a city-wide network that transformed Contemporary Art Week into a festival of cross-pollination between institutions, public spaces, and galleries. Projects like MADE IN residencies linking artists with local industries, the anonymous art project from Japan, and the Vilnius Residency Prize revealed how the fair fosters international dialogue and new models of cultural exchange.
Across the fair, certain aesthetic and conceptual trends were unmistakable. Painting remains vital but increasingly hybrid, as younger artists blend manual and digital methods, address identity and migration, and dissolve distinctions between disciplines. Installations and sculptural asssemblages often reclaimed recycled materials or industrial fragments, while others focused on perfromative and ephemeral gestures. Galleries appeared less interested in the spectacular and more in thoughtfulness: the works invited viewers to slow down, to listen and reflect, rather than merely to consume.
The mood throughout the weekend was one of optimism tempered by realism. The new tax policy hovered like a ghost over every coversation. Collectors and advisors speculated about how it might reshape Italy’s role in Europe’s art market. Some called it a rebirth, others an experiment in controlled chaos. But no one doubted fair’s centrality. Luigi Fassi called Artissima the city’s “metronome”, and indeed, the fair’s rhythm resonated across cafés, museums, and streets filled with visitors. Artissima remained the anchor event around which the city’s entire cutural ecosystem rotated.
Visitors described the experience as intimate yet international, with just enough scale to encourage conevrsation rather than exhaustion. Collectors and curators repeatedly praised the fair’s human dimension: the light, the layout, the sense of discovery. Caroline Bourgeois of the Fondation Pinault noted that “at Artissima there is a conceptual and thinking dimension, and a mix of generations. That’s quite unique.” Others spoke of its balance between intellectual research and market relevance, its ability to make risk feel rewarding rather than reckless.
By the time the last crates were sealed and the lights dimmed on 2 November, Artissima 2025 had proved itself more than an art fair. It had become both a mirror and a motor for Italian contemporary art: a fair that tests economic models as much as aesthetic ones, that cultivates new connections while asserting Torino’s identity as a global labarotory of culture. This is a fair that doesn’t just sell, but speculates in the truest sense, imagining what art can do, what culture can negotiate, what kind of planet we might still deserve.
Artissima’s final press release, unusually poetic, summed it up: “The course has been charted, and the voyage has already begun.”
Credits:
Photo courtesy: © Perottino-Piva-Castellano-Bergadano / Artissima
Words: Anna Renova / @renovaanna
