Sarah Cosulich

Our aim is to involve an ever wider and more diversified audience. Those who come here not only love art, but also speed, cars, the landscape and industrial archaeology. We are a catalyst of passions, all different from each other. This is our true identity. The decision to open up a new course was made by President Ginevra Elkann and the support for the implementation of our program comes from our main partner Fiat.

We have three specific strands: the first is that of the Pista 500 on the roof of the Lingotto, a suspended garden where we host and produce site-specific projects and environmental installations signed by international artists. The second concerns the reactivation of the permanent collection with Beyond the Collection, an annual project that aims to reflect on the presences and absences of the collection (Picasso, Tiepolo, Modigliani, Canaletto, Manet, Matisse among others) in relation to important international institutions; and finally, on the third floor, we have a new program of temporary exhibitions focused on pioneering artists who consolidate the institution’s place in today’s international art scene. We’ve brought Sylvie Fleury here in the past. Now the time has come for American Lee Lozano.

It will be a journey through the eclectic path of Lee Lozano during his career of only twelve years from 1960 to 1972 when he retired from the art world as an artistic action: from the first drawings to the figurative expressionist canvases, to the monumental abstracts up to his Language Conceptual pieces. The imagery of this radical and revolutionary artist often develops from anthropomorphized weapons and tools, male sexual organs as symbols of patriarchal power slogans as hard as punches in the stomach that reveal a rebellion against every rule of society.

She is an important artist and recognized by museums and insiders but her work is not often seen in Europe. Ours is the first monographic exhibition in Italy. Her art and life choices certainly penalized her, having chosen to withdraw and reject the art system in line with the research she carried out with her work. The extreme gesture of a figure who has experienced every language. Her work is confronted with the body and with the identity, even hers, as evidenced by the works in which she classified her experiments and her behaviours. Satirical and violent, ferocious against any preconceived order and, at times, against herself, she is an artist who combines body, eroticism, bowels and mathematics. In short, she is a fascinating artist whose stories and obsessions must be told because they are extremely current.

Everything was born spontaneously. The Pinacoteca today produces each of its exhibitions internally. When, in creating this project, we contacted the Pinault Collection to ask them to loan some works (Pinault is one of Lozano’s largest European collectors), they asked us to be able to exhibit the art show at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

With the new programming, we have opened the Pista 500 to the city. From the roof of the Lingotto, you can admire the city and the mountains from a completely unusual point of view. It is almost a metaphor for our role: to offer unexpected views. The Pista 500 project is enriched with installations specifically designed by international artists and artists for its spaces and is designed to broaden the experience of a symbolic place in the city, making it a cultural destination accessible to all. Here the works dialogue with the conversion of the Lingotto roof from a closed circuit to an open road, from a production site to a space to live together. The relationship with the various local realities of Turin is constant and very close: with the Municipality, with the Region with the Salone del libro…..

I love this place. It is a closed, silent but also elegant and experimental city. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always know how to exploit his talents which remain hidden.

Its mystery.

Its silence, indeed.

We should work more seriously with the school and its programs. given that in textbooks there is no contemporaneity. We should explain to the kids that contemporary art shouldn’t scare them and, above all, that it’s not mandatory to understand.

Art has become a fashion and a form of investment. And this harms research. We go less and less to discover what really intrigues us. The artist finds himself inside this system that devours and digests everything at the speed of light. You chase models when instead you should remain true to yourself. But then I strongly believe in the value of time that in the end cleans everything up.

Not too much. My point of reference is Kasper König, one of the greatest curators of all time, who said: “if you like something too quickly you have to ask yourself questions”. Sometimes it’s worth looking into things that initially annoy you. That too is a reaction to take into consideration. 

I think not (laughs). Because I’m stubborn. But I don’t believe too much in hierarchies, I’m very accessible and in the end, I listen. With a little patience, she gets along with me.

I would not know. I am a rational person who loves irrationality: art allows me to bring these two extremes together.