Third Resonance

With its Third Resonance, GAM Torino continues its exploration of the languages of art, presenting a new thematic chapter that investigates the intersection of enchantment, dream, and disquiet. Here, enchantment emerges through ambiguity, perceptual shifts, and the subtle fractures that open within reality’s surface, revealing its most fragile and enigmatic layers.

The exhibitions composing this Resonance offer visual and sensory experiences where material fragility, the play of light and shadow, and the unveiling of images lead viewers through a poetic and unsettling terrain. Historical works from GAM’s collection enter into dialogue with contemporary pieces, activating unexpected temporal and conceptual resonances—affirming continuity between memory and the present, sedimentation and vibration.

NIGHTS. Five Centuries of Stars, Dreams, Plenilunes —curated by Fabio Cafagna and Elena Volpato— featuring around one hundred works from major European institutions and the GAM collections, traces the night as a space of experimentation, reflection, and introspection from the seventeenth century to today. Organized thematically and chronologically, the exhibition reflects on the nocturnal as a realm of ambiguity, mystery, and discovery, where reason and imagination coexist. From Galileo and Maria Clara Eimmart to Thomas Ruff and David Schutter, NIGHTS spans centuries of cosmic inquiry, with particular attention to Romantic, Symbolist, and dreamlike modern visions by Victor Hugo, Odilon Redon, Franz von Stuck, František Kupka, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Cornell.

GAM also presents Linda Fregni Nagler: Anger Pleasure Fear, curated by Cecilia Canziani, the first Italian institutional survey of the artist. Fregni Nagler employs photography to probe vision, memory, and the materiality of the image. Through collecting, research, and narration, she isolates and preserves fragments of the visible, transforming each photograph into a space of reflection and imagination. The exhibition spans over two decades of work, including The Hidden Mother (2013), the new series Vater, and projects such as Pour commander à l’air, Untitled, and Smokes, Clouds, Explosions. Early works like Bambini and Non voglio uccidere nessuno are also on view.

Installed on the first floor of GAM, Elisabetta Di Maggio: Frangible, curated by Chiara Bertola and Fabio Cafagna, traces the artist’s career through historical works and new pieces conceived specifically for the museum. Cutting central to Di Maggio’s practice- is both an act of care and an irrevocable gesture, an incision that transforms material without the possibility of reversal. Her works -walls of incised tissue paper, soaps carved into urban maps, mosaics in wax and glass, porcelain forms, botanical elements, mandalas of postage stamps- blur boundaries between abstraction and figuration, nature and artifice. Perceptual instability lies at the heart of the exhibition, which unfolds through six rooms exploring mapping, cosmic and botanical patterns, memory, and the sacredness of nature. It opens with Annunciazione (2025), two dragonfly wings in satinised steel, and closes with Desiderale (2006), a video in which cuts on film form a starry sky.

In the spaces of the GAM Videotheque, Lothar Baumgarten: Culture Nature, curated by Chiara Bertola, pays tribute to the artist (1944–2018), renowned for intertwining aesthetic research with anthropological and ecological reflection. The selected works -mainly photographs- document his immersive experience among the Yanomami people in Venezuela in the late 1970s. Here, landscape becomes narrative, and nature transforms into language, memory, and symbolic construction. Baumgarten’s images do not simply record the visible; they generate layered meanings and open new perspectives, challenging the divide between object and representation, between the seen and the conceived.

Each Resonance includes an invited “Intruder”—an artist or curator whose intervention reactivates the museum’s collections and opens new interpretative trajectories. For this third edition, Davide Sgambaro - The Intruder, curated by Virginia Lupo, embodies this role through works poised between enchantment and unease. His practice, at once playful and melancholic, transforms everyday materials and gestures into poetic investigations of generational trauma. Two new installations will occupy the first- and second-floor galleries, while a performance -staged on October 28 and again on November 28- will engage with GAM’s outdoor architecture.

Together, the five exhibitions composing Third Resonance form a polyphonic meditation on enchantment and perception where fragility, memory, and imagination converge to reveal the invisible threads that bind art, time, and the living world.