Turin's Artissima opened its 33rd edition to the public on 30 October, bringing 183 galleries from 35 countries to the Oval Lingotto for three days under director Luigi Fassi, now in his fifth year at the helm. The fair, Italy's only one devoted entirely to contemporary art, runs until 1 November after a preview on 29 October, and its 2026 theme is Fancy: A Flexible, Acrobatic Body, drawn from philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum's writing on imagination as the ability to move beyond one's immediate position.

What sets the fair apart, according to a first walkthrough of the opened edition, is less its scale than the curatorial machinery around it. Three curated sections sit alongside the four main commercial ones: Present Future, devoted to emerging practices through solo presentations; Back to the Future, which recovers artists whose historical standing deserves reconsideration; and Disegni, which treats drawing as a field of research in its own right. Together they place new work beside practices that were overlooked when they first emerged, unsettling the usual idea that recognition arrives in orderly sequence.

The institutional stakes are concrete. Fondazione Arte CRT has confirmed a €300,000 acquisition fund for works entering the collections of GAM, Turin's civic gallery of modern and contemporary art, and the Castello di Rivoli. A network of prizes decided by international juries adds further routes from booth to museum. Fassi has argued that fairs should behave as cultural institutions rather than purely commercial platforms, a position that makes sales figures an incomplete measure of the event's success.

The fair also reserves space for galleries with little accumulated attention of their own. Its New Entries section is limited to young international galleries active for fewer than five years and appearing at Artissima for the first time. Around the fair, Torino Art Week extends the programme across the city, with major institutional exhibitions reconsidering Marisa Merz on her centenary and Carol Rama, while emerging artists inside the Oval try to establish themselves only a few kilometres away.