When we open an art history textbook, the first sensation that strikes us is not aesthetic, but purely administrative. What stands out is the implacable order organizing the subject matter: great periods, undisputed masters, reassuring signatures. This structure, in its apparent neutrality, offers the comfort of an artificial coherence, as if History followed a linear, ascending and predetermined path. The artworks arrive only later, wrapped in that aura of the “masterpiece” which, upon closer inspection, rarely reflects an intrinsic or mystical value, but rather the result of slow political sedimentation, institutional agreements and economic flows.
“News From the Near Future. 30 anni della Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo”, work detail: Maurizio Cattelan, “Bidibidobidiboo”, 1996, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo credit: Giorgio Perottino
It is a mechanism that Francis Haskell revealed with disarming clarity: art history is not merely a succession of formal inventions, but the product of relationships founded on protection and power. No artist grows or creates in isolation. In Patrons and Painters, Haskell described a condition that today we would define as servitude: success did not blossom from a presumed autonomous genius – a romantic lie that dies hard – but from the ability to navigate the architectures of consensus, securing room, board and legitimacy in exchange for loyalty. This brutal asymmetry between individual creativity and the systems that validate it concerns not only aesthetics but touches the heart of social dynamics. Pierre Bourdieu, in The Rules of Art, described this field as a space of war for symbolic capital, where the artist depends entirely on a universe of interpreters and institutions. Without their stamp of approval, a work of art risks remaining a mute gesture, a signal lost in the background noise (as Duchamp, Manzoni, Klein and others had already intuited). Creation is never born in total autonomy: it feeds on the context that welcomes it and, in the act of welcoming it, defines and legitimizes it.
“News From the Near Future. 30 anni della Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo”, installation view room one, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 2025. Works: Margherita Manzelli (left); Paul McCarthy, Ed Atkins; Enrico David, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Sanya Kantarowski, Michael Armitage. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo credit: Giorgio Perottino
If at one time this visibility depended on the whims of court patrons, today it passes through the mesh of the market, controlled by collectors, foundations and private institutions. The new patrons no longer wear Renaissance garb, yet they continue to steer cultural production with the same efficacy. In Italy, a nation where the public network for contemporary art appears frayed and where there is a chronic absence of true Kunsthalles dedicated to research, private foundations have come to occupy the entire horizon. Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo represents the paradigmatic example: no longer a simple exhibition space, but a complex apparatus for training, accompaniment, and, above all, historical legitimation.
“News From the Near Future. 30 anni della Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo”, installation view corridor, work detail: Doug Aitken, “Electric Earth”, 1999 Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo credit: Giorgio Perrottino
It is precisely within this scenario that News from the Near Future is situated. The exhibition, conceived to celebrate the institution’s thirtieth anniversary and distributed between the Foundation’s headquarters and the National Automobile Museum (MAUTO) in Turin, wisely avoids the traditional retrospective form – a term that by now evokes dusty archives – to propose instead an “affective atlas”. The approximately one hundred and fifty works on display do not follow a didactic chronology but are organized as nodes in a network made of residencies, commissions and collaborations. What emerges is a sharp snapshot of our time, traversed by recurring themes: the body, identity, memory, the digital realm and the way our imaginaries struggle to construct the future.
“News From the Near Future. 30 anni della Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo”, installation view room two, MAUTO 2025. Background Slavs & Tatars, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Oscar Murillo; Adrian Villar-Rojas (foreground). Courtesy Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Photo credit: Giorgio Perottino
In the spaces of the Foundation, works such as Fade to Black by Philippe Parreno dialogue with Electric Earth by Doug Aitken, triggering generational short-circuits and poetic suggestions; at MAUTO, meanwhile, the exhibition attempts more daring genealogies culminating in The End – Rocky Mountains by Ragnar Kjartansson, where contemporary art invades the temple of the automotive industry, in a confrontation between the heaviness of the twentieth century and the immateriality of the present. The exhibition title itself, borrowed from Fiona Tan’s 2003 work, alludes to a montage of early twentieth-century newsreels: visual fragments flowing between memory and imagination, reminding us that our gaze upon tomorrow is always filtered through the ruins of yesterday. The names summoned – Cindy Sherman, Isa Genzken, Arthur Jafa, Simone Leigh, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tino Sehgal – outline a global firmament that confirms, once again, how the system is firmly dominated by those who hold symbolic capital. Indeed, if until the 1980s legitimation occurred through belonging to groups, movements and schools, the globalization from the 1990s imposed a more atomized logic: that of the artist-icon, the recognizable brand that condenses an entire discourse into a single gesture. The Sandretto collection reflects this dynamic with almost sociological precision.
Faced with such a deployment of forces, an inevitable question arises: is it truly possible to make the stage of art more accessible? Is there a way to dismantle mechanisms that, while changing their skin, continue to re-propose ancient logic? Media evolve, names rotate, but the deep gears remain surprisingly stable. One need only shift one’s gaze slightly to realize that the “near future” continues to operate with the exact same tools as the past and that, in all likelihood, its “news” will continue to arrive, at least for a while, from the same sources.
Info:
A.VV. News from the Near Future
28/10/2025 – 8/03/2026
curated by Bernardo Follini and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo
“Convergenze” project curated by Giacinto di Pietrantonio at MAUTO
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino)
Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile – MAUTO (Torino)
www.fsrr.org
Nicola Bigliardi (1995) is an art historian, curator and writer. After graduating in Economics and Art History, he is currently a PhD student in Aesthetic Philosophy at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. His practice combines art-historical research with narrative writing, as evidenced by “Whisky & Soba” (Midgard, 2025), “Cinematics” (Postmediabooks, 2023), and “Lo spiritoso nell’arte” (Bookabook, 2021). He collaborates with art galleries, non-profit organizations, and associations, and holds lectures and conferences for museums, universities and cultural institutions.
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