Even by art world standards, it was a swell party. More than 500 leading artists, curators, collectors and gallerists from across the world converged on Turin last October for a grand dinner to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and to honour its president and founder. The patron-collector extraordinaire Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has arguably done more than any other individual to establish Turin as a vibrant international art centre, and over the past three decades she has been crucial in shaping the art world as we know it today. As Tate’s director of collection for international art Gregor Muir declared on Instagram: “30 years ago the contemporary art world didn’t exist. Not before Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaundengo.”
The status of Signora Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in her hometown was confirmed by the festivities taking place in the enormous central hall of the city’s National Automobile Museum (Mauto) where the much loved art matriarch, resplendent in one of her trademark tailored coat dresses and garlanded with a collar of vintage rhinestones from her famous collection of costume jewellery, was presented by the mayor of Turin with a cultural medal. Equally noteworthy was the number of artists—around 40—who had shown up, many more than at most collector shindigs.
Even with the pomp and circumstance, it felt very much like a (grand) family affair. Philippe Parreno enacted a cryptic performance with the ventriloquist Nikolas Bushi, while artists represented in the foundation’s more than 1,500 strong collection—including Tobias Rehberger, Doug Aitken, Glenn Brown, Helen Marten, Alvaro Barrington and Magali Reus— gathered with Patrizia, her husband and sons around a lofty birthday cake. Atop it was the foundation’s star logo, which is based on her family crest and motto: “the power of the stars”.
“I believe in collaboration,” she told me before the bash kicked off. “In this city there has always been a very good relationship between the private and the public.” And also the commercial. It wasn’t a coincidence that the celebrations were scheduled to coincide with Turin art week and the Artissima art fair, with which Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has been closely involved right from the start—she hosted the dinner for the first edition of the fair 32 years ago. She was also especially happy that in the same week Enrico David, an artist she has long supported and who she feels has “an exceptional vision”, had opened a major solo exhibition at Turin’s Castello di Rivoli (I’m Back Tomorrow, until 22 March).
A constellation of spaces
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo first decided to collect contemporary art during a trip to London in 1992 when she met Lisson Gallery’s Nicholas Logsdail. He introduced her to Anish Kapoor and she still owns the Kapoor pigment piece she bought that day. She soon established herself as a patron who collected slowly, seriously and in depth. “I understood artists didn’t only want to have a private collector, but a collector who is actively involved in the art world, and for that I established the foundation in 1995.” Two years later she started showing work in her 18th-century family palazzo in Guarene, Piedmont, and then in 2002 unveiled the foundation’s current Turin base in an extensive, minimalist building designed by Claudio Silvestrin.
The Turin space, along with the downstairs galleries of Mauto, is hosting an extensive anniversary exhibition of around 150 key works from the foundation’s collection under the title of News from the Near Future (until 8 March). Sandretto Re Rebaudengo doesn’t use advisers, declaring: “I pay attention to everybody: to galleries, curators, artists and also to collectors.” Lately she’s increasingly been working with her son, Eugenio.
While 2025 may have marked a milestone birthday, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and her foundation show no sign of stopping. In 2017 she opened a branch of the foundation in Madrid that mounts pop-up shows by young artists in unexpected spaces. Since 2019, the foundation has run an art park in Guarene devoted to open-air sculpture and installations. Then, during the Venice Biennale in 2022, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo revealed she had bought the island of San Giacomo in the Venice lagoon, where this year she plans to open a green-powered centre for exhibitions, performances, residences and creative discussions around the environment and climate change.
A new initiative announced last year will see the foundation going transatlantic. The New Futures Production Fund is a partnership with New York’s New Museum to support the annual production of a major new work to be shown at both venues. The Italian artist Diego Marcon is the first recipient. Not for nothing did this dynamo proclaim at her grand bash: “This anniversary is not a finish line but a new beginning”. Watch her many spaces.
