NEW YORK, NY.- A half-hour drive from central Milan and its high-fashion boutiques is a vast compound where locomotives and farm machinery were once manufactured, and which today is dedicated to a single activity: the display of contemporary art.

Pirelli HangarBicocca has been up and running for 20 years: It was established in September 2004 as a nonprofit contemporary-art foundation by the Italian tire maker Pirelli, which supplies tires for Formula One.

It was inspired by Tate Modern, the power station turned museum in London, and at first glance, the two spaces have much in common: the postindustrial architecture, the soaring ceilings, the vast exhibition spaces. And not coincidentally, a onetime director of Tate Modern, Vicente Todolí, was hired in 2012 to run the Milan foundation’s artistic program.

Yet Pirelli HangarBicocca is no Tate copycat. Instead of using its largest exhibition space to display a single commissioned artwork (as Tate does), it stages site-specific career surveys of artists, preferably living ones.

Over the years, the massive Navate space has hosted the room-sized “environments” of the Argentine Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana, the mesmeric installations of performance artist Joan Jonas, the suspended neon sculptures of the Welsh-born Cerith Wyn Evans, and the dramatic film works of British artist Steve McQueen.

From Oct. 10 to Feb. 2, HangarBicocca will be overtaken by an artist whose works mesh perfectly with the space: Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, who died in 1991, but left a legacy of spinning metallic megamachines, more than 30 of which will swarm the Navate, recalling the days when it was a locomotive factory.

By common reckoning, the foundation has helped put contemporary art on the map in Milan, where cultural institutions were previously focused mainly on Italy’s rich past and art heritage.

Pirelli HangarBicocca “has become, through the excellence of the program, a really important space,” said Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Previously a curator at Tate, Morgan organized several site-specific commissions inside Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall, including towering slides by the German artist Carsten Höller that visitors swooped down in large numbers. Höller later exhibited at Pirelli HangarBicocca, turning the space into a giant fairground.

Morgan noted that, like the Turbine Hall, the vast postindustrial spaces of HangarBicocca are “so immense and so potentially overwhelming” that it is “a real risk for an artist” to take them on — a risk that the institution’s curators have managed carefully, through their choice of artists and works.

In 2015, another ambitious contemporary-art foundation, the Fondazione Prada — established in 1993 by fashion designer Miuccia Prada — opened up a space in a former distillery on Milan’s southern rim. The Fondazione Prada appears to enjoy greater name recognition among the international public and foreign visitors.

“Prada has the weight of the marketing behind it, and the name that is immediately internationally recognized,” said Morgan, who said she visited both spaces when in Milan. “Inevitably, there’s going to be much more of a kind of curiosity, and from a touristic perspective, more of a pickup.”

Pirelli HangarBicocca, which last year drew 135,000 visitors, operates on an annual budget of about $5.5 million and puts on four exhibitions a year. In October 2025, an exhibition of works by American artist Nan Goldin is set to occupy the main space.

Though Pirelli HangarBicocca has no collection of its own, it is the permanent home of a massive site-specific installation by the German artist Anselm Kiefer. The installation, “The Seven Heavenly Palaces” (2004-2015), consists of seven reinforced-concrete towers as much as 65 feet high that look rickety and about to collapse. The towers are now complemented by five giant Kiefer canvases representing apocalyptic scenes.

It was Marco Tronchetti Provera, then the CEO of Pirelli and now the company’s executive vice chair, who had the idea to create Pirelli HangarBicocca.

A visit to Tate Modern in the early 2000s left him awed by the sheer scale of the former power station. On his return to Milan, he set his sights on the disused factory compound next to the Pirelli headquarters and decided to turn it into a contemporary-art hub.

In 2012, eight years after the space was established, he invited Todolí to take it over. Todolí demanded that the art venue be made available to the public free of charge.

“I said: ‘Listen, you shouldn’t make money with art. It’s an act of generosity toward society. You make money with tires,’” Todolí recalled in a phone interview. He also asked that Kiefer’s towers, which were “dominating everything” and hovering like “Big Brother” over every other exhibition in the space, be closed off and kept separate from the rest.

Todolí’s vision from the start has been for each of the exhibition spaces not to have internal partitions or dividing walls. He believes that each artist should be able to occupy the space with their artworks and installations alone — and with no help from scenography, fancy sets or enclosures.

Not all artists are up to the task, or right for the space. So before approaching them, Todolí said, he and his fellow curators carry out “rehearsals” on site, putting on pretend exhibitions using boxes, crates, steel cables, tape and rope to get a sense of how the artist’s work will look in the space. The artist is invited “only when we are convinced that there will be a symbiotic relationship between the art and the space, where both will be transformed,” he said.

What’s it like showing at HangarBicocca? The Jamaican-born American sculptor Nari Ward, who had an exhibition there earlier this year, recalled being daunted on his first visit, because there was a show of Bruce Nauman, “one of my art heroes,” and because Pirelli HangarBicocca was intimidating “in terms of the artists they have shown.”

Ward pointed out that in an art world that has become dominated by painting, HangarBicocca was a refreshing platform.

As a sculptor, he said, “one unspoken material is space: it’s about the experience of moving around something,” and “this entire building is about space.”

He also liked the fact that solo exhibitions put new works in conversation with early works, allowing him to “see back into my making practice, and actually think about materials that I thought I’d walked away from.”

“The team know what they’re doing,” he said. “They know what’s going to work and what isn’t.”

Todolí wholeheartedly agreed, adding, “My motto is always: If the artist is happy with the result, we are happy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.