“In those days it was always a party. Just leaving the house and crossing the street, to become like crazy, and everything was so beautiful, especially at night, that coming back dead tired they still hoped that something would happen…”

La Bella Estate, Cesare Pavese

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, the exhibition La Bella Estate curated by Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, and Mark Rappolt at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo (Guarene, CN) aims to capture the frenzy of the 1990s, the first and formative decade of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection. The exhibition intertwines three narrative threads: the history of the collection and its origins; the trajectories of influence and dialogue embodied by individual works; the more personal narrative of Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and her family, and how her private passion has evolved into a space for public discourse.

Featuring the works of nearly thirty artists, La Bella Estate imagines a space in transition: a historic family home - Palazzo Re Rebaudengo - that reflects both the rethinking of the lower floors as a series of contemporary galleries, dating back to the mid-1990s and designed by architects Corrado Levi, Alessandra Raso, and Alberto Rolla, and the original 17th-century palace; both private and public; simultaneously in the past and in the present. Within the walls of the Palace, La Bella Estate evokes the space of invention and creation, a space that is both fictional and factual, repopulated through art, artifacts, and ephemeral objects. These suggest a period of relentless experimentation, just before the globalization of that art world in which the patron and philanthropist Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo would later become a protagonist, and suggest, at the same time, the ways in which that period anticipates the globalized world in which we live today. While on the one hand the exhibition celebrates the works of artists collected during the formative decade of the 1990s, on the other hand it looks to the future in the ways in which the thoughts contained in those works continue to “walk”, as in an endless summer, through other works, which have been directly influenced by those in the collection or have taken up the ideas explored by them and carried them forward. Like the collection itself, these “bounces” traverse time and space, including, for example, works by Julian Opie associated with a video by Ayoung Kim, or the dialogue between works by Philippe Parreno and Ho Tzu Nyen, emphasizing that discourse, debate, and conversation are the driving forces of the collection as a whole.