Italian art collector, museum founder and philanthropist Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has spent decades shaping the international contemporary art scene, championing young artists and cultural spaces worldwide. Her collection—an impressive 1,500 contemporary works, many acquired in the past 25 years—sits alongside roughly 1,000 pieces of costume jewelry and 3,000 photographs. Based in Turin, the restless and passionate Italian collector is also a fixture on several prestigious museum boards, including the International Council of New York’s MoMA, the International Council of London’s Tate Gallery, the Leadership Council of New York’s New Museum, the Contemporary Art Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Board of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the Board of Directors of Lyon’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) and the Advisory Committee of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum.
Her collecting journey began in 1992 with work by artists of her own generation—an approach she still champions today. “A collector friend from Turin offered to go to London together,” Sandretto Re Rebaudengo tells Observer. “She was really forward-thinking, as in the ’60s and ’70s, she was buying already Cy Twombly, Piero Manzoni, or Giulio Paolini. We spent a week in London, and she took me to visit the artists’ studios emerging back then and now contemporary stars.” Among the artists they visited was a young and emerging Anish Kapoor—then just 30, with no inkling that his works would soon command millions. “Creating a relationship with artists has always been important to me, and I began my journey at that moment.”
Today, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s collection reads like a who’s who of contemporary art: she has works by Maurizio Cattelan, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sarah Lucas, Ian Cheng, Cindy Sherman, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Cerith Wyn Evans, Damien Hirst, Josh Kline, Mark Manders, Charles Ray, Rudolf Stingel, Rosemarie Trockel and Adrián Villar Rojas, to name just a few. She also keeps a keen eye on the next wave, acquiring works by artists who have gained prominence in recent years, including Paulina Olowska, Marguerite Humeau and Danielle Mckenney. “Now I collect the generation of my sons, who are in their late thirties,” she says. “I’m trying to keep watching, not stopping. I try to pay attention to the present.”
When asked what defines the “X factor” in her decision to acquire a piece—what makes a work relevant and full of potential—Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is unequivocal: she has always been drawn to politically and socially engaged art. “Art that talks about politics and society. What I’ve always looked for in an artist is an ability to talk about the current moment in which we live or even anticipate it.” A prescient example? The exhibition she opened of Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere just before the pandemic. Forced to close due to quarantine measures, the show had already envisioned and staged a desolate, deathly scenario eerily reflective of what the world would soon experience.
Living in Turin rather than a major art hub, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo still relies on international fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach to discover new artists and stay current with emerging names. Yet she acknowledges that navigating these events has become far more challenging than they were when she started collecting. “When I started to approach the art world and collect, the circle was much smaller and tighter,” she recalls. “But you need to be there; that’s why I continue attending art fairs. I still believe strongly in the role of art fairs, as they allow you to see the world in one place through the galleries and the artists.”
In December, however, her stop in Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach was brief because she was due to attend the 56th CIMAM Annual Conference in Los Angeles, one of the most significant museum conferences in the world. She saw it as a crucial opportunity to engage with institutions and rethink the future of public and private museums in an evolving cultural landscape. With institutions worldwide grappling with urgent contemporary issues, the conference would serve as a key moment of reflection—one that would help shape the future direction of her foundation as it approaches its 30-year anniversary.
Driven by a desire to bring the work of her favorite artists to the public and create a platform that would support their careers and visibility, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo wasted no time. Just three years after beginning her art collection, she established the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in 1995. “I then decided to create the foundation because it was a way to give back all that art gave me. I wanted to give back and amplify what I was receiving through my foundation and educational projects,” she explains. “I believe contemporary art is easy or can be made easy once made accessible. I was committed to making it easy for everybody to approach and understand it, having this powerful desire in me to educate, train, tell people.”
Conceived as an observatory for contemporary artistic trends and cultural languages, the foundation has been instrumental in supporting young Italian and international artists, often focusing on commissioning and producing new works. “For me, the relationship with the artist has always been at the center, and then the purchase comes. But it’s also important to commission an artwork because many struggle to support and find the resources to make more ambitious works that are not otherwise produced in the commercial setting.”
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Since 2002, the foundation has had a permanent home in Turin, in a neighborhood shaped by the city’s industrial past and ongoing transformations. The exhibition space hosts rotating shows by contemporary international artists, aiming to inspire and engage the local community while reviving Turin’s legacy as an artistic hub—one that once birthed Arte Povera and continues to host the influential Artissima fair.
Before opening this dedicated museum space, the foundation had already established a first venue—an 18th-century residence protected by the Superintendence of Cultural and Environmental Heritage—which remains open for visits today. In 2019, just a short distance from the residence, the foundation expanded its footprint further with the opening of the San Licerio Art Park, an ambitious outdoor space showcasing large-scale permanent commissions by contemporary artists including Ludovica Carbotta, Manuele Cerutti, Carsten Höller, Mark Handforth, Paul Kneale, Wilhelm Mundt and Marguerite Humeau. “It was a family palace, which we completely changed, giving it a new life: we turned part of the building into an exhibition space, while the other part is a residency for artists and curators.”
For Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, championing curators is as important as supporting emerging artists—a belief that led to the creation of the Residency for Young Foreign Curators, a program designed to bring international curators to Italy, immersing them in the country’s contemporary art scene. “Every year, we invite three curators who come to Italy, stay for three months, travel all over and get to know the artists.” The initiative not only fosters deeper engagement with Italian contemporary art but also increases international exposure for local artists, who might later find themselves included in global exhibitions and projects. As a natural extension of this program, the foundation launched Campo in 2012, an independent course for Italian curators that has since trained a new generation of professionals who are now helping to shape the country’s art scene.
By 2017, the foundation expanded beyond Italy, establishing a branch in Spain. While it doesn’t yet have a permanent venue, it operates through nomadic activations, particularly during ARCOmadrid, Spain’s leading art fair. “I love Spain; my father had a lot of business in Spain, so I grew up between Cadaqués and Barcelona,” she says. “I thought that the experience of the foundation we could bring it elsewhere, and Spain was for me the country that seems to me the closest and with similar needs as Italy when it comes to its contemporary art scene.” In keeping with that mission, last year the foundation supported a major intervention by artist Precious Okoyomon in El Retiro Park, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The project, realized in collaboration with Madrid’s City Council, took over the Montaña de los Gatos—an artificial mountain that was reopened for the occasion. The foundation’s past projects have followed a similarly thoughtful approach to activating historical sites, as seen with Michael Armitage at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Yann Chen at the Fondation de Castro and Lucas Arruda at the Ateneo. Next up, as Sandretto Re Rebaudengo tells Observer, the foundation will present new works by sought-after painter Pol Taburet inside a stunning palace just outside Madrid during ARCOmadrid in February.
Always intent on fostering sustainable development in local art communities, the foundation also launched a residency for international curators in Madrid. Annually, three young curators come to Spain, travel across the country and then return to Madrid to organize an exhibition featuring Spanish artists. “I believe in this network synergy that we can put together between young artists and curators to activate an art scene,” says Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s ambition is as relentless as ever. She shares details of another unique project in Venice—one of the foundation’s newest endeavors in Europe. Not far from Burano and Murano, she and her husband have acquired a small island, which they plan to transform into a hub for exploring the intersection of art and sustainability. “My husband is involved in renewable energy, so here we can put together my love for art and then invite artists to produce new works intersecting those themes,” she explains. So far, they’ve hosted two events centered on this crucial dialogue between creativity and environmental responsibility.
The ability to commission and support ambitious new projects remains central to both the foundation and the collection. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo recalls a particularly striking example: a recent monumental installation by Goshka Macuga, produced when the collection was exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The work—a towering rocket—invited visitors to embark on a journey through a vibrant, multifaceted selection of pieces by fifty artists from around the world, offering a snapshot of the events, sentiments and issues that have shaped humanity over the past decades.
Next, the collection heads to the U.S. for the first time. Opening January 26 and running through June 23, “Through Their Eyes: Selections from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection” at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California, will be an international, intergenerational exhibition focusing on women artists whose work interrogates identity—primarily through the lenses of gender and sexuality. “The exhibition has this focus on women artists, that for me it was one of the strands that from the beginning I felt very close to me,” Sandretto Re Rebaudengo explains. “It was a way to confront myself. You know, the ‘90s were different from today, but in 30 years, the world has changed a lot. In the ‘90s, it was still hard for female artists, but in so many aspects or places, this is still the case also now.”
Today, she notes, her collection is evenly split—50/50 in terms of gender, but that framework, she acknowledges, feels increasingly reductive. Recalling a recent conference on women artists and museum collections, she recounts a moment when, after hearing speech after speech about the binary divide, she raised her hand and asked, “But do you only know how to talk about men or women? Today, the world is no longer going in that direction.”
In a world evolving at breakneck speed—often too fast to fully grasp in the moment—Sandretto Re Rebaudengo remains committed to keeping an open mind, resisting external influences and approaching everything with free and independent judgment. “If you want to collect, you have to have an open mind,” she says toward the end of our conversation. “I always say that contemporary art has completely changed my life. It has been an investment in my inner universe.”
For her, the true value of collecting lies in the ongoing dialogue with artists—moments of learning and self-discovery that offer new ways to see the world and cultivate greater tolerance and openness. “Often, it’s all about talking a little less and listening more,” she reflects. “From artists, you get messages that can make you read life completely in a different way and make you approach other people differently.” She believes this is precisely what contemporary art should do: help us see the world more clearly—and imagine how it might transform.
The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection will debut in the U.S. with the exhibition ‘Through Their Eyes: Selections from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection,” which opens on January 26 at the Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis.
