ArtNomads strive to bring you fair and honest reviews of art fairs and exhibitions around the world, to help you plan your artistic travel.

In May 2024, we traveled from Asti up to Turin (Torino) for the EXPOSED Foto festival and ThePhair, a photography-only festival held annually since 2019. See our impressions of EXPOSED here.

The first thing you should note is that while ThePhair has been presented since 2019, we would not have known about it if someone hadn’t shoved a flyer in our hands a few weeks earlier, at the MiPhoto festival in Milan. It did not surface on any art fair lists we know of – this review is a scoop for our US-based readers.

ThePhair is invite-only, which means it’s pre-curated with quality galleries. The 2024 edition claimed more than 30 galleries, and we did count 36, though at least one was present but not listed on the official website.

We arrived at 5:30pm on a Friday, ThePhair‘s first full day, and we were surprised by the lack of attendees. It was after work, and although the skies were threatening, it hadn’t yet started to rain. Pardon the pun, but the lack of energy really dampened our enthusiasm.

Still, we’d come all this way, and wanted to see what there was to see. We started as we usually do, carefully reviewing each gallery’s booth, but Mr. Nomads wasn’t feeling it. We had to sit down and regroup.

Instead, we decided to quickly walk the whole fair to get an overall impression, and see if something inspired us and got us excited.

That helped! In 10 minutes, we formed a solid impression of ThePhair, which was that it was more contemporary than we expected – even more than MiPhoto, which we enjoyed.

Check out our 20-second overview, if you just can’t wait:

Many of the works surprised us. We were expecting the usual mounted, framed, matted display format, but instead we saw a much more sculptural approach from several artists and galleries. Our backgrounds in craft & objects probably biased us even more favorably to the art we saw.

A few standouts

Best overall presentation

Mrs. ArtNomads chose A Pick Gallery, from Turin, as her favorite for overall curation. The artists’ works flowed well together and were complementary in style and coloration. Even the gallery staff’s clothing seemed intentional. The gallery says it “focuses on researching and sharing new artistic languages through emerging artists on the international scene”.

Favorite Familiar Artist

We found one familiar artist at Ticinese Art Gallery’s stand. They featured Roberto Rinella‘s black and white urban neorealism photo montages. Rinella physically cuts and pastes scenes of Italian villages using past and present images, fitting them together to trick the eye. The end results are sort of fantastical, surreal towns, drawing you in for a closer look and private virtual journey.

We first saw his work at MiPhoto, and it seems the gallery doubled down, presenting larger-format works (which we feel work even better). 

Favorite New Artist Pick: Christian Chironi

Christian Chrioni’s feature at NContemporary intrigued us. These artwork are part of a larger performance project: the artist is traveling to some 12 countries, staying in 30 homes and structures designed by the famous architect Le Corbusier – all in a Fiat 127, which Chrioni repaints according to the chromatic combinations of each structure. His project means to “question the distinction between nomadic and sedentary life”. We just like the photos in boxes.

What you get to take home is a series of polychromatic plexi boxes containing bent, molded or folded photographs of those structures, drawings and a book documenting the project. It’s interesting that while clearly more mixed-media / performance than pure or traditional photography, this work is presented at a photography fair.

Mr. Nomads’ picks:

Another work that really resonated with me was this piece, by Carolle Bénitah, presented by Alessia Paladini Gallery.

The top row image fades over time and vertical space, leaving only vestiges, or memories of the original subjects. That’s really photography, right? Capturing and preserving memories of moments, places, or people in our lives?

In our travels, we often see art made from something else: sculptural images from pencils, toothpicks, etc. In Marco Lanza’s case, he makes sculptural images from photographs. Lanza’s Ricreazione series creates new stories from preserved ones; he cuts out portions of photographs and then composes those elements into an entirely new display, creating a new narrative in the process.

In an even more meta move, both sets of images are displayed as a diptych, with the altered photos adding a third layer of introspection. I really appreciated Lanza’s work, presented by Noema Gallery.

Photography or Sculpture? Why not both!?

Continuing the theme, Mr.Nomad was struck by how many of the artists presented photography in a highly sculptural way.

I really liked these works by Per Barclay, presented by Galleria Giorgio Persano. These lambda prints are mounted to aluminum, and sandwiched between plexi – nothing super innovative there. It’s the artist’s inclusion of steel – as display, rivet or fine wire in each that takes these artworks to another level. Yes, this is photography, but Barclay is more a mixed-media artist.

Of course, as with MiPhoto, we also found several digital or video artworks. IMHO, Luca Spano’s piece, with RedLab Gallery (below) stole the show.

This piece is intriguing, menacing, thought-provoking. Is it “photography”? As things are being categorized currently, maybe so. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Either way, I liked it.

Overall, ThePhair is a winner.

Despite the lack of attendees, we really felt this was a strong, interesting boutique-level photography art fair. You had the time and space to look in detail to really enjoy the works. Allow 2-3 hours, and you’ll have time to get deep.

ThePhair was diverse. While there were a few stalwarts like Cindy Sherman, many works used AI, photo manipulation, collage, added materials &/or paint. Many presented more like sculpture than photography in the traditional sense. Therefore, it’s also interesting in a broader contemporary art sense.

There was a little something for most every contemporary photography fan (there was no Ansel Adams, Brady, White, etc). If you’re interested in what is perhaps the cutting edge of photography, and its potential for presentation in new ways (thus opening new market segments), we definitely recommend you attend ThePhair on your visit to Turin. Before you go, see our overview on the photography scene in Torino, and why you should plan your trip to Piemonte for May.

_{Disclaimer: While this review is a true and accurate account of our experience at the art fair, we did receive complimentary tickets as “members of the press”.}