Paola D'Agostino, Royal Museums of Turin Director - Musei Reali di Torino

Paola D'Agostino, Royal Museums of Turin Director - Musei Reali di Torino

Paola D'Agostino

Director of the Musei Reali di Torino

Photograph by Giuliano Berti 

for the Royal Museums of Turin

Courtesy Musei Reali di Torino

Royal Museums of Turin

Palazzo Reale di Torino

Photograph by Daniele Bottallo

for the Royal Museums of Turin

Courtesy Musei Reali di Torino

Palazzo Reale Galleria del Daniel

Photograph by Andrea Guermani

for the Royal Museums of Turin

Courtesy Musei Reali di Torino

Palazzo Reale Scala delle Forbici

Photograph by Dario Fusaro

for the Royal Museums of Turin

Courtesy Musei Reali di Torino

Following the completion of the appointment procedures, Dr. Paola D'Agostino took up office as Director of the Royal Museums of Turin on 1 October 2025 .

Paola D'Agostino takes over the prestigious role held by Enrica Pagella from December 1, 2015, to November 30, 2023, and, following the recognition of the Royal Museums as a first-tier state museum, by Mario Turetta, Head of the Department for Cultural Activities of the Ministry of Culture, as Deputy Director.

An art historian and specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, she graduated and obtained her PhD from the University of Naples “Federico II”, with specializations at the Courtauld Institute of Art and University College London. From 2015 to 2024 she led the Bargello Museums in Florence and boasts extensive curatorial experience abroad, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as a Senior Research Associate in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, to the Yale University Art Gallery, as the Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator in European Art .

In her first words as Director, Paola D'Agostino declared : “ I am very honored to begin my new role as Director of the Royal Museums of Turin, which, with their monumental heritage, extraordinary art and archaeological collections, Library, and Royal Gardens, constitute one of the most prestigious museum complexes in Italy and the world. Over the last ten years, the Royal Museums have experienced extraordinary growth, thanks to the two high-profile directors who preceded me. It is a privilege to contribute to the cultural project and to the valorization of these places and of the Savoy dynasty, which designed them, enriched them with masterpieces, and modified them over time .”

" Walking through the monumental halls of the Royal Palace ," continued Paola D'Agostino, " wandering through the spaces of the Manica Nuova with its diverse collections, stopping in the Royal Library, or strolling through the Royal Gardens gives a sense of the centrality of the Royal Museums to the city. These halls convey not only the cultural and political history of Turin and Piedmont, but also the unique history of Italy and its extraordinary cultural heritage ."

Paola D'Agostino - Biographical notes

Paola D'Agostino is an art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. She studied at the University of Naples Federico II, where she received a PhD in art history in 2003. She specialized in London, at the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA, 1998) and University College London (MPhil program, 1998–1999). While studying in London, she collaborated on the exhibition Earth and Fire. Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova , at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2001–2002).

He taught for several years as a contract professor of modern art history at several Italian universities and held seminars at British and American universities.

From 2009 to 2013, she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a Senior Research Associate in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts . During her tenure at the Metropolitan Museum, she also helped organize the exhibitions Bernini: Sculpting in Clay (2012–2013) and Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works (2013). In spring 2013, she was the Cynthia Hazen Polsky/MET Visiting Curator at the American Academy in Rome. From 2013 to 2015, she was the Nina and Lee Griggs Assistant Curator in European Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, where, among other things, she co-curated the exhibition The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art 1760–1860 .

From December 1, 2015, to January 14, 2024, she served as Director of the Bargello Museums, a museum group that includes the Bargello National Museum, the Medici Chapels Museum, the Orsanmichele Complex, the Palazzo Davanzati Museum, and the Casa Martelli Museum. During her tenure, these five museums underwent extraordinary work on their monumental buildings—among the oldest and most important in Florence—including collection reorganizations, experimental restorations, research agreements with Italian and international universities, and exhibitions, with prestigious international collaborations from the National Gallery in Washington, to the Museums of Berlin, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

During her tenure as Director of the Bargello Museums, the Bargello National Museum was awarded the 2017 medal by the President of the Italian Republic, Hon. Sergio Mattarella, for organizing the exhibition "The Factory of Beauty. The Ginori Manufactory and its People of Statues." She was responsible for organizing the Bargello Museums' exhibition " Donatello. The Renaissance," curated by Francesco Caglioti, co-organized by the Bargello Museums and the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation. The exhibition received the prestigious Apollo Award in London for best exhibition of 2022.

Since 2023, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the IMT School of Advanced Studies in Lucca.

In 2024 she collaborated on the “AD Arte Project – national platform of services for the accessibility of cultural sites”, for the General Directorate of Museums of the Ministry of Culture and from January to June 2025 she was Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti – The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies.

On July 17, 2025, she was selected as Director of the Royal Museums of Turin, following an international competition by the Ministry of Culture for five Directors of national museums and archaeological parks.

ROYAL MUSEUMS OF TURIN

MUSEI REALI DI TORINO

Piazzetta Reale 1 – 10122 Torino – Italia

museireali.beniculturali.it

Rachel Hakimian Emenaker @ Luce Gallery, Turin - "The Wind Will Carry Your Traces" Exhibition

Rachel Hakimian Emenaker

The Wind Will Carry Your Traces

Luce Gallery, Turin

30 January -  7 march, 2025

Luce Gallery presents Rachel Hakimian Emenaker, The Wind Will Carry Your Traces. The show features eight batik paintings made from melted wax and hand applied dye. Through this unique approach, the artist reimagines and integrates ‘craft’ with the painting medium. Her composite cityscapes and interior scenes of everyday life convey profound familial and cultural histories, reflecting her diasporic upbringing. Rachel Hakimian Emenaker leans heavily into rich earth tones punctuated by vivid pops of burgundy, lemon, chartreuse, and indigo, heightening the visual impact of each composition. Her paintings are defined by thin yet saturated washes of dye, contrasted by crisp white linework that animates figures and details throughout each canvas. Together, the works in The Wind Will Carry Your Traces invite viewers to witness how diasporic histories and memories are integral in everyday life, fostering connections within communities.

The exhibition’s title, The Wind Will Carry Your Traces, poetically suggests how deeply held values and memories travel with us, shaping who we are no matter where we call home. Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s ability to seamlessly blend Eastern and Western art traditions reflects her multicultural background and artistic journey infusing her work with remarkable depth. Of Armenian descent, she moved frequently during her formative years, living in Suriname, Russia and now the United States. This rich confluence of influences informs her work, drawing from European painting traditions, Armenian religious iconography, Soviet-era cinema, and ‘craft traditions’ from the Middle East and South America.

Having studied painting in undergraduate school, she gravitated toward the batik techniques she learned while growing up in Suriname, eventually integrating these methods with Western-style narrative compositions on canvas. Batik, a traditional Indonesian craft, involves creating intricate designs by applying melted wax to fabric and dyeing it in layers. The artist begins her process by drawing with melted wax to create distinctive, permanent lines on the canvas. As an unforgiving medium, wax leaves no room for error; every gesture—whether intentional or accidental—becomes a permanent element of the composition. After the wax dries, five to ten layers of dyes are applied with watercolor brushes, followed by a washing process to refine the colors. The canvas is then washed to remove the wax, leaving behind the crisp white lines that define their work. The final steps include drying, steaming the canvas flat, and attaching it to a stretcher, giving the piece a traditional painting appearance. This meticulous process is not only a technical feat but also a poignant metaphor for the artist's exploration of memory and cultural preservation.

A defining feature of Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s work is the crisp white lines, which she describes as a form of “resistance.” Created by the wax’s resistance to dye, these lines give each painting a bold and cohesive structure. For the artist, this resistance symbolizes resilience in the face of erasure. The lines embody how people preserve and adapt cultural traditions, reconstructing memories into new forms that anchor them in a new home.

Her seminal painting, Traces, a wide main street winds through a vibrant village nestled in the hillside, where terracotta tiled-roofed buildings, postwar apartments, and octagonal churches coexist. A family strolls along a sidewalk while two women converse nearby, standing near a large puddle that shares the town’s reflection and energy. Here figures are painted entirely from recollection, often referencing family members or acquaintances, making each encounter deeply personal yet universally resonant. As with all the artist’s paintings, this scene is reconstructed from fragmented memories, family stories, and vivid descriptions, forming a collective diasporic memory brimming with detail and artifacts. The rolling hills in the background could easily symbolize inherited memories of Kessab, Syria, where ancient churches rise above towns, or evoke the lush green hills of Los Angeles in springtime, seamlessly blending past and present. The painting captures the essence of the diasporic experience: a liminal space where the boundaries of time and place dissolve, allowing distinct cultural and historical influences to coexist in one richly layered composition.

The strength of Rachel Hakimian Emenaker’s work lies in her ability to harness the labor-intensive nature of their medium to emphasize its conceptual depth. Each scene she creates feels as though it could exist anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere all at once, creating this intersection of familiarity and vagueness where memory is most at home. Hakimian Emenaker layers diverse architectural styles and distinct cultural objects that embody the diasporic experience, illustrating how individuals adapt to new environments by bringing familiar elements of Eastern and Western cultures, as well as regional nature motifs, into their new lives. Her paintings present a convergence of cities, aesthetics, and past worlds, blending them into a seamless recreation of diasporic memory. These works invite viewers to consider how memories and cultural fragments persist, transform, and coexist in new spaces, encouraging deeper engagement with the vibrant and multifaceted nature of the diasporic experience.

Rachel Hakimian Emenaker (Armenian-American, b. 1992) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in painting, installation, craft, sculpture, sound, and textiles. In 2024, she earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the UCLA Broad Art Center, Los Angeles (2024), and the American University of Armenia, Yerevan (2017), as well as in group exhibitions throughout California, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2017). Emenaker is the recipient of the 2024 Dedalus MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture and the 2023 UCLA Elaine Krown Klein Fine Arts Scholarship. Her work is included in international private collections.

LUCE GALLERY

Largo Montebello, 40 - 10124 Torino

www.lucegallery.com

Collins Obijiaku @ Luce Gallery, Turin - Traces of Me

Collins Obijiaku: Traces of Me 

Luce Gallery, Turin 

May 4 - June 30, 2023 

Luce Gallery presents Traces of Me, the first solo exhibition for COLLINS OBIJIAKU with the gallery. On view are series of new portrait paintings - all with his signature meandering charcoal line-work.

Collins Obijiaku is a Nigerian-based painter who uses the tradition of portraiture to examine the depths, truths, and complexities of humanity. In each work, the artist paints quiet, composed figures, with expressive gazes, to directly engage the viewer. To further strengthen the allure and intimacy, Collins Obijiaku draws a winding line—with no detectable beginning or end—that weaves throughout the sitter’s face and skin reminiscent of ‘mapping’ each person’s life journey. Together, the paintings in Traces of Me encourage viewers to contemplate the individuality of each person, as well as their distinct contribution to the diversity and complexity of the human experience.

This exhibition brings together a collection of portraits of people the artist has known since childhood. As the title Traces of Me hints, the paintings conceal a small element of the artist’s connection between him and each kindred spirit on view, a sentiment Collins Obijiaku felt after working on the series. In every elegant composition, he observes an old friend, memorializing their likeness, and thoughtfully records their inner conviction of strength, hope, positivity, and intelligence. Although usually indifferent to incorporating symbolism into his work, his use of ochre yellow, in many of the paintings, references the artist’s nostalgic connection to the hue from childhood. He recalled that all the brightest students were selected for the yellow group — a color he still associates with intelligence to this day. While aesthetically pleasing, the true strength of Collins Obijiaku’s work is how he marries observations of each sitter’s distinct mannerisms and expressions, with his meditative charcoal line work, to gently guide the viewer to see more deeply and encourage profound empathy.

In Portrait of Gladys (woman in blue dress) we see an elegant, young Nigerian woman donning a periwinkle blue dress. In a pale yellow room, she sits with her arms pressing downward, shifting her weight slightly left while leaning ever-so-slightly forward toward us, meeting our gaze directly. There’s a brief pause in her expression — her eyes slightly squinting— as if she’s examining us, rather than the other way around.

Her demeanor is calm and poised, while simultaneously exuding an inner confidence. For Collins Obijiaku this confidence is particularly important to emphasize with his female sitters, as he seeks to change common misconceptions of women, and instead emphasize their power. Meandering throughout her face, across her chest, and cascading down each arm, Collins Obijiaku’s signature charcoal lines create visual pathways for the viewer to explore. Working much like fingerprints or wrinkles, the lines identify her, as well as all the twists and turns of life. She knows who she is, where she’s been, and where she aspires to be.

COLLINS OBIJIAKU (b.1995) is a Nigerian-based visual artist working in portraiture. A self-taught painting and drawing artist, Collins Obijiaku creates alluring portraits of individuals from his home country. In each work captivating gazes and skin permeated with charcoal line work resembling topographic maps, foster a deeper understanding of both the individual, and ultimately humanity as a whole. In 2019, Collins Obijiaku was an artist-in-residence at Black Rock Senegal, the multidisciplinary residency program founded by artist Kehinde Wiley in Dakar, Senegal. Collins Obijiaku’s works have been also exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco and the National Gallery of Arts in Enugu in Nigeria. His international exhibitions throughout Africa, Europe, and the United States include a solo show with Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, California. Additionally, his work has been acquired by numerous private collections and public institutions, including the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas.

LUCE GALLERY

Largo Montebello, 40, 10124 Torino

www.lucegallery.com

Delphine Desane @ Luce Gallery, Turin - Dreams of a Dreamer

Delphine Desane, Dreams of a Dreamer 

Luce Gallery, Turin 

Through 27 February 2021 

Researching, blending and fusing disparate cultures, periods and moments, Delphine Desane uses her practice as a vessel for self exploration. The brush is a vehicle for understanding. Her simple forms contain multitudes. They speak to a single moment, packed with emotion, memories, longing. A single line acts as a marker for realizations, loss, and labor. Delphine Desane’s portraits are direct, intentionally unembellished, quietly referencing the shapes and figures of known and unknown ancestors. Only after completion do influences present themselves to her - the pointed chin of a Dan Mask, the flattened scapes of the Obin family’s practice (Philomé Obin in particular), and the graphic qualities of Ghanian Asafo Flags. Bold and clear, her portraits are purposefully impersonal, so as to not limit their message.

In Delphine Desane’s first solo show “Dreams of a Dreamer”, landscape provides no home to the artist's cast of characters. Instead they must find roots on their own. These roots find fertile ground in the memory of the viewer, growing slowly into something that can’t be ignored. In her three years as a practicing artist, Delphine Desane has seeded themes of displacement, home, birth and regeneration. Her steady hand relays a grace and conviction central to her person, depicting mostly female, sometimes animal characters, with pieced together identities, both connected to and separated from the Earth. Her generally minimal backgrounds are “an open question,” allowing the viewer to imagine her figures almost anywhere. What multiplicities exist within her subjects are held in the eyes. The truth rests in an iris, but is only accessible to those willing to look directly at it. Like the artist, these figures refuse to be boxed in.

Delphine Desane’s subjects live outside of time - a child, a mother and a grandmother all at once. Lineage is held within a single husk - an impossibility in our physical realm. Delphine Desane’s figures are not defined by their past, present or expected future, respectively, but encapsulate all that they could be, all that they are, all that they were, in one explosive moment. “No matter where you go, the first thing people see is your blackness,” says the artist, and so, that is often the only clue given to the viewer - a reclamation of agency.

Drawing on the surrealist and religious themes in Hector Hyppolite’s paintings (a peer of Andre Breton) and the perceptive black and white photographs of Katsu Naito and Seydou Keita, Delphine Desane creates ever-extending narratives that seem to grow and move as you witness them. There is something ancient in these paintings. Like the figurative etchings on Greek Amphora or the portrait on an agate cameo, “I’ll Open My Sun-Filled Heart to You” shows us a figure thrown into relief, passion shown in her stance alone. In “Promised Land” we see a traveler nearing the end of her journey. Nature folds in on her as she moves, protecting or restricting.

At this early stage in her career Delphine Desane’s oeuvre speaks to the scores of experiences she has weathered at each stage of her life as a Black woman. Her canvases relate to each other in their anonymity. One consistent feature is the artist’s use of blue, valued because it is “synonymous with infinity.”

In “Dreams of a Dreamer”, Delphine Desane brings together the latest body of works, simply rendered, and sensitively offered. The paintings shown detour from Delphine Desane’s previous works in their ambition, easily traceable through their growing size. The artist is beginning to connect the dots between her personal history, imagined future, and the myriad identities of her people. She reaches for something that is purely her own and in so doing excavates the many inescapable influences that inform her dual cultural identities (Haitian and French). Dreams of a Dreamer is one long, never ending, waking dream. A chosen dream. One in which the message is revealed and the messengers are hidden.

By Camille Okhio

LUCE GALLERY

Largo Montebello 40, 10124 Torino

lucegallery.com

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