The automobile, for as long as it has existed, has sometimes anticipated, sometimes accompanied and sometimes followed art and its stimuli. It can therefore come as no surprise that in the heart of Art Basel, among curators, artists and collectors, Roarington Art Centre announces its next appearance in the digital world, suggesting the intertwining of art, culture and the automobile.
The ever-increasing number of visitors to Roarington.com are familiar with its most famous partners: the National Automobile Museum in Turin, Mercedes-Benz Heritage and the 1000 Miglia, whose designs of great cars and the stories of culture they bring with them are celebrated. And not only that, because for Roarington the car is not just a means of transport, but a cultural object, a symbol of vision, technology, craftsmanship, memory and identity.
Art, like the automobile, is timeless: artistic language, like stylistic and technological language, continually reworks its canons in the dynamics of a fast-moving world combining extraordinary achievements with disquieting uncertainties. Art has taught us all this. The car too, with an extra element of passion that we at Roarington can never forget.
The proximity between cars and art also finds a meeting point in the pleasure of collecting: be it an Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia or a conceptual diagram by Matt Mullican. Roarington's move towards art does not mean passing from one audience to another, but giving the collector and the enthusiast the message that beauty, rarity and narrative transcend each individual sphere.
With this in mind, Michael Ringier, eminent Swiss publisher and visionary collector has set out on the path to shape a space called Roarington Art Centre in which curatorial thinking can unfold without boundaries. Be it modern or contemporary art, even the most advanced, it will be stimulating to see how it can meet the boundless world of the automobile and its most diverse aesthetic, technical, cultural and social interpretations.
Designed by Italian architect Benedetto Camerana, the Art Centre will not be a replica of a physical museum, but a new form favoured by digital technologies where spatial discipline and narrative immersion can merge. As the architect says, in this space, tradition meets invention. And where architecture ends, imagination begins’.
At Art Basel 2025, the Roarington Art Centre announced Michael Ringier's chosen approach politely but with equal clarity: in the VIP Lounge and along the exhibition route, visitors come across digital portals offering glimpses into the visual and conceptual identity of the future Centre. Messages that do not announce a product but a philosophy that will be staged to the rhythms of its time.
The first encounter with Roarington Art Centre this autumn, entitled That Nothing Should Exist, will embrace five decades of Matt Mullican's research into consciousness, systems, symbols through to avatars. A message of openness for the conventional car world, a place to delve into the emotional, intellectual and cultural terrain that big cars have always occupied and that, too often, has been forgotten. Art Center will therefore have the stimulating opportunity not to distance but to bring together and merge two great universes firmly enshrined in the human soul.
In a world increasingly mediated by screens, the Roarington Art Center dares to ask: What if the screen itself became sacred space?
