The Best Shows to See in Turin Right Now

‘Nights: Five centuries of stars, dreams, plenilunes’ | Galleria d’Arte Moderna Torino (GAM) | 29 October – 1 March 2026

With its twinkling Milky Way, pockmarked moon and recognizable constellations, Adam Elsheimer’s The Flight into Egypt (c.1609) is thought to be the first naturalistic depiction of the night sky to appear in a Renaissance painting, evidence of concurrent developments in astronomical knowledge. A popular etching of the painting appears in this exhibition, which surveys the lure of the nocturnal hours across five centuries and includes works by Joseph Wright of Derby, Odilon Redon and Vija Celmins. Don’t miss Giulio Paolini’s celestial concrete pool Anni luce (Light Years, 2001), permanently installed in the grounds of GAM, or his spectacular light sculpture Palomar (1998), in which a figure tightrope-walks among glowing stars and planets, which occupies a selected Turin street every winter as part of the annual lights project Luci d’Artista.

Alice Neel | Pinacoteca Agnelli | 31 October – 6 April 2026

‘I Am the Century’ is the first retrospective in Italy dedicated to Alice Neel, a giant of American portraiture, whose subjects meet the viewer’s gaze with an uncommon intensity. Neel captured a vast spectrum of sitters, from her Harlem neighbours to celebrated poets and artists – among them Annie Sprinkle and Frank O’Hara – as well as critic and curator John Perreault in a resplendent nude portrait in 1972. This chronological exhibition focuses on the way Neel’s work registers the transformative effects of time’s passage at both historical and intimate scales, evidence of a vision that is both unsparing and deeply humane.

Birgit Megerle | Turiner Kunstverein | 31 October – 5 December

Birgit Megerle’s portraits, often painted in fresh, pale shades such as rose, sea-foam and putty, have a curious psychological effect that is interesting to consider in relation to Neel’s work. The German painter often reduces or flattens detail when painting her female subjects – whether they are celebrities or unknown models – causing our attention to snag on peculiar details, such as the silver elephant pendant on a sitter’s necklace in Center (2025). At artist-run space Turiner Kunstverein, Megerle’s subjects, pictured in abstracted or blurred environments, are often stripped back to the point of anonymity or homogeneity. Bleached, girlish and ghostly, these paintings depict moments of openness and closure, creating an unusual self-awareness about the way that we apprehend others. 

Enrico David | Castello di Rivoli | 30 October – 22 March 2026

Raised in a family of trained artisans in the coastal town of Ancona and based in London since 1986, Enrico David conceives this retrospective as an imaginary homecoming to Italy. Specially devised for Castello di Rivoli’s vast Manica Lunga gallery, ‘Domani torno’ (I’m Back Tomorrow) is a comprehensive examination of the body as a site of change, featuring a parade of polymorphous figures that split, sputter or mutate – opening strange new orifices or sprouting multiple heads. The exhibition reveals David’s search for a new visual language that he might live within and includes artworks and display devices that draw from theatre and design.

Jeff Wall | Gallerie d’Italia | 9 October – 1 February 2026

At this 17th-century palazzo, recently transformed into one of Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia museums, a significant survey of 27 works by Jeff Wall has been arranged by frequent collaborator David Campany. Included are several of Wall’s luminescent distillations of dramatic moments from memories, novels, paintings and the everyday – among them After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000), the artist’s ‘misreading’ of Ellison’s 1952 novel, in which his protagonist illegally siphons electricity to power the 1,369 lightbulbs that cover every inch of his basement ceiling in Harlem. Also on view at the venue is Luca Lo Pinto’s group exhibition ‘The screen is a muscle’, featuring video works by Shahryar Nashat, James Richards and Julia Scher, among others.

Angharad Williams | Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo | 30 October – 4 January 2026

This new exhibition by Welsh artist Angharad Williams follows her illy Present Future Prize win at Artissima 2024 and revolves around a single painting, one that collapses several images and associations with power and vulnerability. Portrait renders the late Princess Diana in the style of Gerhard Richter’s iconic painting Betty (1988), in which the subject turns away from the viewer in a blur of movement that withholds and protects her. Williams has depicted Diana wearing her famous bright red knitted jumper featuring a single black sheep among a flock of white ones, an expressive detail later read as symbolic of a woman living within a repressive monarchic system. 

Mario García Torres | Galleria Franco Noero | 27 October – 28 February 2026

Following his retrospective this year at Kassel’s Fridericianum, Mario García Torres – known for his quixotic endeavours and performances – turns to the medium of painting for the first time. In an era when the veracity of any given image is more in question than ever, García Torres pushes this uncertainty into muddier waters, examining the role of the artist in creating images that blur truth and fantasy. Drawing from photographs and archival materials from 20th-century Mexican history, the artist subjects his source materials to a mechanical reproduction that distorts and abstracts the images in greyscale, before painting them, continuing his long-standing practice of unsettling or even altering history. 

_{Main image: Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti, Notturno con effetto di luna (Nocturne with Moon Effect), 1825-30, tempera on cardboard, 85 × 119 × 8 cm. Courtesy: Musei Reali, Palazzo Reale, Torino}