CROSALAND: The Visual World of Italian Artist Andrea Crosa at Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, Turin

From 26 October to 15 November 2025, the elegant spaces of the former theatre at Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana (Via Bligny 2, Turin, Italy) will host CROSALAND, a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Italian artist Andrea Crosa (b. 1949).

Crosa spent his youth in Buenos Aires before returning to Italy in the mid-1970.

The exhibition is curated by art critic Enrico Debandi, artistic director of the venue.

Featuring over one hundred works – including installations, environments and painted objects – the exhibition invites visitors on a visionary journey. Andrea Crosa’s creations defy traditional categories of painting or sculpture: they are pictorial objects where architecture, colour and matter coexist. By abolishing the limits of the frame, his works expand into real space, engaging in dialogue with the surrounding environment. Private interiors and everyday objects evoke a mysterious sense of suspension, as if each scene were a moment frozen in time, linked to an unseen event that can only be imagined.

The exhibition opens with Suburban Gulliver (2006), a monumental installation that introduces the theme of the domestic microcosm, so dear to the artist. A whole miniature town, made up of identical, reassuring houses, is interrupted only by the presence of an iconic 1957 Studebaker car. This object calls to mind the “candy-colored streamline baby” – the gleaming, pastel aerodynamic car described by Tom Wolfe in his 1965 essay The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, portraying postwar America as a civilisation of aestheticised objects where chrome-plated cars, jukeboxes and everyday items became symbols of freedom and desire, ultimately elevated to the status of popular art (that is, pop). The Studebaker, with its fluid lines, chrome details and pastel hues, belongs fully to that imaginary world – a fetish object of an ingenuously optimistic era that believed in industrial beauty as a vehicle for redemption.

Crosa evokes a world that is ultimately illusory. The artist constructs an emotional geography rooted in post-war South America, inspired by the post-rationalist aesthetic of the mid-twentieth century, with its pastel colours and essential forms. Post-rationalism, while derived from the functionalist rigour of rationalist architecture, departs from it by favouring clean lines and geometries softened by delicate, luminous tones. Architects and designers such as Gio Ponti, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Franco Albini and Carlos Raúl Villanueva embodied this sensibility. Crosa connects to this formal horizon by depicting ordered, silent domestic spaces where balance and proportion coexist, within an apparently serene and promising world. Echoes of American Pop Art – from Claes Oldenburg to Wayne Thiebaud, Tom Wesselmann to David Hockney – are recognisable, yet reinterpreted with a distinctly personal and contemporary sensibility. Crosa simplifies and stylises colours and forms, seeking an inner and psychological intensity, creating works that are concentrated, enigmatic and symbolic.

The setting for this suspended pop world is the former theatre of Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, one of the most captivating examples of Turinese Baroque. Designed in the early 18th century by Filippo Juvarra for Marquis Baldassarre Saluzzo di Paesana, the palace is the largest private noble residence in the city. Its rooms, adorned with frescoes and stuccoes, retain the elegance and theatricality of the Savoy period. The former theatre, long a venue for remarkable cultural and artistic events, offers a space where contemporary art and historical memory merge into a single, compelling visual narrative.

Exhibition Information

CROSALAND. A Journey into the Artistic World of Andrea Crosa

Curated by: Enrico Debandi

Dates: 26 October – 15 November 2025

Venue: Former Theatre of Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana, Via Bligny 2, Turin

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 3:30 pm – 7:30 pm

Special opening hours during Turin Contemporary Art Week, 31 October – 2 November 2025, from 3:30 pm to 11:30 pm.

Guests attending the dinner by Danish chef Rasmus Munk, in town for the gastronomic event Buonissima, have the opportunity to preview the exhibition on the evening before the official opening.

The photographs show selected works by Andrea Crosa.