Sara Enrico. Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin

Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin is a site-specific project which, for the first time since the collaboration between Fondazione Furla and GAM began, will be developed exclusively in the outdoor spaces of the Villa Reale gardens, providing new scope for interaction between contemporary art, the natural landscape, and public spaces.
Sara Enrico is an Italian artist whose sculptural research revolves around notions of materiality and corporeality. All of Enrico’s work deals with the notion of “transition” as well as constant experimentation and the mixing of languages to explore the relationship between the surface or “skin” of the object and its form and material substance. Integrating approaches from tailoring, choreography and architecture, the artist combines materials such as concrete, pigment, fabric, and steel in configurations that evoke a latent vitality and articulate a fluid relationship between body, clothing, and space.
Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin presents a series of new productions designed specifically for the unique context of the Villa Reale parklands, stemming from a reflection on the garden as a place where nature is functional to the landscape design: a human construction, modelled and designed according to aesthetic, philosophical or social canons, where natural elements and cultural superstructures intertwine.
Starting from this dualism between nature and artifice, Sara Enrico has created “a landscape within a landscape” through a series of sculptures that inhabit the garden without seeking to mimic it but, on the contrary, triggering a subtle tension between the plant kingdom and an idea of synthetic vitality, between what arises spontaneously and what is the upshot of a deliberate gesture. Ever a place of representation and reflection, the garden becomes a sort of stage on which the artist’s works confront the surroundings in a relationship of unstable equilibrium, playing with the continuities and frictions between work, environment, and viewer.

This project represents the seventh event in the Furla Series, the exhibition cycle that Fondazione Furla has been developing since 2017 in partnership with major Italian art institutions, featuring an all-female program designed to celebrate and promote the contributions of female artists to contemporary culture.
Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin was born out of a long-standing partnership between Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, one that began in 2021 and involves a series of annual exhibitions where contemporary art interacts with the museum’s spaces and collection.

Sara Enrico (Biella 1979, lives and works in Turin) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, before specialising in the restoration of ancient paintings at the Spinelli Institute in Florence. Winner of the 2018 New York Prize, she was artist-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. In 2021, she received the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellowship in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. She has exhibited at prestigious institutions both in Italy and abroad, including: Castello di Rivoli – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (2024–25); Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto (2024–25); OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin (2023); 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Národní galerie Praha, Prague (2019); Mart di Trento e Rovereto (2019); OFF Biennale Cairo, Cairo (2018); PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (2017); and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014).

Cover photo by: Sara Enrico. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione Furla. Photo Andrea Rossetti