PAT renovated the Modern Art Gallery in Turin, by subtraction

With over 50,000 visits in the first month since its reopening, Turin’s Gallery of Modern Art (GAM) has celebrated the beginning of its new life.

PAT. has curated the Lotto Zero intervention, spatially embodying such new beginning: working by subtraction, trying to free the original building from the additions that had accumulated over the years – layers of plaster, plasterboard, false ceilings, disused installations – the intervention transformed a 3,200 square metre surface, according to a circular perspective, fully embracing that “doing more with less” which is an ethical and ecological imperative.

In the foyer, ticket office and cloakroom have been rationalised to give the space back its original breath, freeing and unplastering the pillars, bringing back to light the bush-hammered concrete seen in 1959 photos, when the newly inaugurated Gallery, designed by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti, was a reference point for avant-garde museum architecture in Europe.

The second floor, then, reopens to the public after six years: the 1990s grid ceiling has been removed, and the sloping roof and perimeter walls, the glass windows open on the garden and the city, as well as 1,200 full square metres of exhibition space are back. New arrival: the Deposito Vivente (Living Depot), a section where, by reusing the grids from the Gallery’s warehouses, works that would normally be relegated to those same warehouses are now put on display.

(photo Giorgio Perottino, Giovanni Comoglio)