GAM - Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

GAM is Turin's civic gallery of modern and contemporary art, heir to the first public modern-art collection created in Italy in 1863. Its collections hold over 45,000 works — paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and one of Europe's major collections of artists' film and video — shown through rotating displays and ambitious temporary exhibitions.

Why it matters

When Turin founded its civic modern-art collection in 1863 within the Civic Museum, it beat most European capitals to the idea that living artists belonged in public collections. From that nucleus GAM has grown into one of Italy's foremost modern museums, and its holdings mirror the city's particular genius: Arte Povera, futurism, and the twentieth-century Italian painting and sculpture that grew up around Turin's industrial and intellectual life. Unlike the royal museums nearby, GAM is a civic institution, run by the Fondazione Torino Musei together with MAO and Palazzo Madama. The museum combines a historical survey, from nineteenth-century masters through the avant-gardes, with temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.

What to notice

The collection's strengths include First, the nineteenth-century rooms, where Piedmontese and Italian painting of the Risorgimento era shows the collection's founding taste. Second, the twentieth-century core: futurist works, Metaphysical painting and the postwar generations that connect Turin to the wider story of Italian art. Third, the Arte Povera presence — Turin was the movement's home ground in the late 1960s, and the museum's relationship with artists such as those of that circle is visible throughout the collection strategy. Alongside the wall-bound works, GAM's drawings and engravings cabinet and its artists' films and videos collection, among the most important in Europe, represent holdings most visitors never see but that make the institution a research reference. Temporary exhibitions have included centenary retrospectives and displays drawn from the graphic collections.

Context and history

The gallery's story begins in 1863, when the city resolved to acquire works by living artists as part of its new Civic Museum — an unusually forward-looking decision for the time. The collection moved between locations through the nineteenth century before settling in its current building on Via Magenta, opened in the late 1950s to designs by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti, giving the museum flexible upper galleries and a sculpture-focused ground floor. Over the following decades acquisitions and donations built the 45,000-work holdings that now span painting, sculpture, installation, photography, works on paper and moving image. The Fondazione Torino Musei runs GAM alongside MAO and Palazzo Madama, sharing ticketing and conservation resources. The museum continues to commission new work, maintaining the founding idea that the collection should stay in conversation with living production.