Dep Art Gallery - Light Blue 14 

Pino Pinelli + Imi Knoebel · Gerold Miller · Regine Schumann · Wolfram Ullrich + Brian Wills · Gerhard Marx · Beatriz Morales · Jaime Poblete

For Artissima 2026, Dep Art Gallery proposes Field, Fragment, Event: Painting in Expanded Space; a project that traces more than five decades of artistic endeavour in which painting emancipates itself from the flat rectangle and confronts the viewer as object, relief, architectural fragment, or luminous event. Across eight positions from different countries, the presentation demonstrates how a radical rethinking of the painted surface — its support, its material, its relationship to space and light — has been a continuous and internationally shared preoccupation from the 1960s through to the present.

The itinerary opens with a seminal figure of Italian Pittura Analitica: Pino Pinelli (Catania, 1938 – Milan, 2024), whose disseminated monochrome fragments scatter across the wall in organic trajectories, letting colour breathe through real shadows and the surrounding architecture. Pinelli's lifelong investigation — the canvas broken, freed, and returned to painting as gesture and field — sets the theoretical foundation for the entire presentation.

From the German tradition, Imi Knoebel (b. Dessau, 1940) provides the conceptual hinge: his shaped wood and aluminium painted constructions, informed by the Bauhaus legacy and by Malevich, are the moment in which pigment fully merges with industrial matter. Three artists born in 1961 then explore distinct yet complementary trajectories from this axis: Gerold Miller transforms automotive lacquer on laser-cut stainless steel into 'set visions' that hover between picture and mirror; Regine Schumann orchestrates fluorescent Plexiglas modules whose chromatic afterglow dissolves the boundary between object and atmosphere; and Wolfram Ullrich builds painted steel perspectives as vectors of an alternative spatial perception in which colour reconnects to the practice of painting.

Two further positions extend the inquiry across the Atlantic. Brian Wills (b. Lexington, Kentucky, 1970) belongs to the California Light & Space movement: his panels of coloured threads wrapped around wooden substrates, encased in polyurethane, produce surfaces that vibrate and shift with the viewer's movement and available light — minimal in structure, yet radically perceptual in effect. Gerhard Marx (b. Johannesburg, 1976) brings a poetic-philosophical voice rooted in the traditions of drawing and sculpture: through acts of dissection and reassembly of pre-existent material — cartographic, architectural, botanical — Marx constructs alternate spatial imaginaries that hold multiple positionalities and folded histories simultaneously.

The presentation is further expanded by two artists whose practices open the dialogue to the Americas and to a younger generation. Beatriz Morales (b. Mexico City, 1981), working between Berlin and Hidalgo, Mexico, combines an abstract-expressionist sensibility with traditional craft materials — layered acrylic skins, agave fiber, and the gestural mark she calls mancha — to produce large-scale chromatic fields that dissolve the boundary between painting and textile installation. Her work was presented at Dep Art Out in Puglia in summer 2026, as part of the Puglia Art Project. Jaime Poblete (b. Santiago de Chile, 1981), living and working in Erba, Italy since 2011, develops a painting practice rooted in gestural abstraction and the philosophical investigation of colour, identity, and territory. Through controlled chromatic baths that replace the direct gesture, Poblete's dyed and folded fabric works echo the way weather and time mark ancient stone — a practice first shown at Dep Art Out with the solo exhibition Eden Ulmo (2024).

Taken together, the nine positions compose a single visual essay on surface, perception, and the persistent vitality of painting as a spatial event. The booth insists that painting is no longer merely a window but an event that shares our space and our light — an argument as urgent in 2026 as it was when Pinelli first scattered his fragments across a wall in 1976.

VIP PREVIEW DAY
Thursday, October 29 | Invitation only

PUBLIC DAYS
Friday, October 30 12:00 – 20:00
Saturday, October 31 12:00 – 20:00
Sunday, November 1 11:00 – 19:00

LOCATION
Oval Lingotto Fiere Torino, via Giacomo Mattè Trucco, 70 – Turin
For further information please refer to the official fair website:
www.artissima.art