She might have won the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from Bard College this year, but Christov-Bakargiev has no truck with the job title. She ‘drafts’ shows like a draughtswoman, she says; ‘you curate pork to make prosciutto’. Either way, there was no filler this year at Turin’s Castello di Rivoli, of which she is director, and Cerruti Villa, which put its $600m collection of modern art on display for the first time. The former hosted exhibitions by artist Michael Rakowitz and Anri Sala. Yet the bulk of Christov-Bakargiev’s energy has this year been devoted to preparing the Cerruti collection – amassed by entrepreneur Francesco Federico Cerruti from the late 1960s to 2014 – for its big public reveal in April. Through a body of work ranging from Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War (1863) to Medardo Rosso’s The Jewish Child (1892), as well as more recent paintings by Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri and Pablo Picasso, the collection didn’t need much hyping.