5 galleries to keep an eye on after Artissima 2025 The best offerings from Italy's most important contemporary art fair

Art fairs are an arena where participants from the creative sector – collectors wearing ON sneakers and tailored suits – move together with young curators in 6-panel hats, in a dance made of phrases like: «we absolutely have to catch up»; «I didn’t see you in St. Moritz this year»; «see you in Basel then», and other variations on the theme. We have just been to Artissima 2025, the leading contemporary art fair in Italy, active since 1994 and now in its 32nd edition, to tell you about the things we loved most and the galleries to watch this year.

Here, then, are the 5 galleries you absolutely must follow:

Galleria Acappella

The mission of Corrado Folinea, founder and curator of the Galleria Acappella in Naples, is made up of intelligence, radial thinking, and unconditional love for a creativity that gets its hands dirty. For the Monologue/Dialogue section, he presents a two-person conversation: Davide Farcaș and Alessandro Teoldi. «Return to the rural world,» as the curator puts it. Not in a didactic sense, but as a return to reflective work made of tools, wood, iron, strength, and gentleness. Farcaș, born in Baia Mare, Romania in 1990, expresses himself through paintings of environments, characters, and urban views that emerge from a seemingly remote present. He portrays landscapes and intimate, powerful views that, when looked at closely, seem not even painted but sculpted. Alongside him is Teoldi, with a series of new works on linen that combine figurative realism and still-life collage, including Shells and Peaches (2025). Painted, shaped, and layered with a spontaneity reminiscent of craftsman-like gestures, they intertwine painting and material composition. Next to these is a work from his much-appreciated series made with fabrics from blankets collected during travels between Milan and New York, where the artist also notes the airline to which each blanket belongs. The artistic project, as if that weren’t enough, inspired Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino for the Haute Couture Fall 2021 collection.

Matèria

Remaining within the Monologue/Dialogue section, the Matèria gallery from Rome presents more of a banquet than a conversation. They told us that their collaborations are actually «many little marriages», which says a lot about their approach and sensitivity. This year they present Stefano Canto, Marta Mancini, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Karen Knorr, and Maïmouna Guerresi, and it is on the last two artists that we want to focus. Knorr is a photographer. From London gentlemen’s clubs to the Bank of England, since the 1970s the artist has sought to represent power by infiltrating hard-to-access places. The photograph presented is The Principles of Political Economy from the Capital series (1990–91), shot with a large-format analog camera, and represents a critique of institutions and their relationship with capital. Guerresi, an Italian-Senegalese artist, presents instead Eid al-Adha («Feast of the Sacrifice»), a site-specific work. The piece reassembles female tank tops, sewn and enameled onto white tiles, evoking the idea of a butcher’s wall. A surface that retains the imprint of stitched garments, evoking the sacrifice of the most maternal and compassionate part of society. Through Islamic symbology, Guerresi transforms the ritual into a reflection on consciousness, memory, and shared intimacy.

Jousse Entreprise

The Jousse Entreprise gallery, based in Paris, participates in the Main Section presenting Claudio Coltorti and Victoire Inchauspé. In Coltorti’s work, the human body loses its contours and merges with the surface of the canvas. Even when the figure is absent, the landscape is deconstructed until it becomes a fragment in transformation. Painting thus opens up to the viewer’s gaze, who completes its meaning: the image is never fixed but continually interpreted and renewed by whoever observes it. Inchauspé instead presents a series, The Last to Leave the Party, of eight bronze-patinated sunflower sculptures ranging from one and a half to two meters tall. The works stand like silent presences, almost as if guarding something. On one hand they protect, on the other they seem to inhabit the threshold between life and death. These sunflowers, bent by time, tell of the beauty of withering, the strength and fragility of matter that decays without ever fully extinguishing itself, like the flower that, in dying, leaves behind the seeds from which life can begin again.

Alma Pearl

Alma Pearl presents a solo exhibition of works on paper by Margarita Gluzberg (b. 1968). Conceived specifically for the fair’s Drawings section, curated by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, these works continue an ongoing series made entirely with a single set of pencils from a now-closed Soviet factory named after the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Each pencil and each color is used to the very end, consumed in a process that becomes meditative. The works arise from a tension between the mechanical and the spiritual: an almost automatic repetition reminiscent of surrealist écriture automatique, where the mark seems to oscillate between writing, image, and transmission—something received rather than intentionally created.

Barbati

Barbati is a Venetian gallery founded by Michele Barbati that this year presents Laura Omacini, Marc Prats-Quintana, Lucas Fernando Rubly, Sofia Silva, and Felice Tosalli. Our eyes stopped on two works. Silva, an artist and writer based in Padua, develops work connected to personal experiences. Pinocchio Wounds the Terrible Dog-ish draws inspiration from classical Chinese painting in a composition whose structure she built herself. In the collage, Silva mixes fragments of previous works, layers, and materials. A surface in which the mark becomes something received rather than constructed. Staying within the fairy-tale theme, Tosalli (1883–1958), a Bergamo-born sculptor who moved to Turin, worked with maple wood and had a deep interest in animal anatomy. The exhibited piece, Once Upon a Time There Was a Princess (1924), carved directly from wood, belongs to a series begun in those years and seems to hold something of the artist’s own soul. Barbati wanted to create a project that would involve the Gomiero antique gallery and, at the same time, establish a connection with Turin, the city where the artist had lived.