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 seven positions from four 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.

Taken together, the seven 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
Saturday, October 31
Sunday, November 1

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