TURIN.- From the three new exhibitions dedicated to Berthe Morisot, Mary Heilmann and Maria Morganti emerge the themes that inspire the new layout of the permanent collections: light, colour, instant and rhythm. After many years, the second floor of the Museum reopens, thanks to an architectural project that has enhanced the original structure and the rooms that are flooded with light. A section of the second floor houses the Living Storage, in which the visitor lives the immersive experience of a museum storage area. Finally, Stefano Arienti is the “intruder” invited to disrupt the established order of the museum.

The project of the new GAM—Turin’s Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, conceived by the new director Chiara Bertola, kicks off on Tuesday October 15, 2024, the day of its inauguration.

The renovation of the museum spaces, which has enhanced the original architectural layout of the building inaugurated in 1959, accompanies the decision to make the new museum resonate, with exhibitions that kick off the new exhibition season and the complete refurbishment of the permanent collections.

The First Resonance inaugurates three major exhibitions dedicated to three leading international artists: Berthe Morisot, curated by Maria Teresa Benedetti and Giulia Perin, Maria Morganti, curated by Elena Volpato, and Mary Heilmann, curated by Chiara Bertola. The start of the new season is also marked by the reopening, after many years, of the Museum’s second floor, the complete refurbishment of the historical collections and the inauguration of the Living storage, a display that, in emulating a museum storage area, enables visitors to enjoy an environment densely packed with works of art and in constant transformation.

Mary Heilmann’s carefree painting technique conceals a complex structure that reveals itself gradually, just like that of Impressionist paintings. The American artist’s investigation, characterised by the dazzling light of the American West Coast, meets Berthe Morisot’s gaze on the French society contemporary to her.

Finally, Maria Morganti’s painting, which retains the memory of time through its stratifications, is an eloquent counterpoint to the fleeting nature of the Impressionist brushstroke.

The complete rearrangement of the collections, curated by Chiara Bertola, Elena Volpato and Fabio Cafagna, is conceived in dialogue with the three exhibitions, thus generating a polyphony whose underlying themes are light, colour, rhythm and the instant. Casting aside any precise chronological framework, the works resonate alongside one another, allowing often unexpected affinities and tensions to emerge.

Also opening up other possibilities of interpretation is the new “intruder”, artist Stefano Arienti, invited, with his interventions within the Berthe Morisot collection and exhibition, to create stumbling blocks, interrupting the pre-constituted narrative and arousing the visitor’s attention. His is a disturbing and necessary intervention, which insinuates itself into a known world to stimulate new readings.

But the new GAM also starts with the Lotto Zero project, which envisages, under the direction of architectural studio PAT. Architetti associati, the renovation of the foyer’s reception areas, transformed to restore their original luminosity and to facilitate visitor access and rest, as well as the reopening of the second floor and the creation and design of the Living Storage.