FLORENCE.- Following the success of the 2009 awards, the
Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS) presents the second Emerging Talents, a project comprising an exhibition and prize presenting and promoting the younger generation of successful Italian artists, aged between 25 and 35 years. The CCCS will show a representative selection of works by all 16 participating artists at
Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence from 19 February to 1 May 2011. The winner of the 2011 Emerging Talents Award will be announced at the opening of the exhibition on 18 February 2011.
The project is intended to identify and foster those creative talents in Italy that have the potential to make an impact on the international contemporary art scene. At the same time, it is intended as an occasion for the visitor to engage with Italian contemporary art. The selected artists are considered to be some of the most talented young Italians whose work has been exhibited or has aroused the interest of galleries but not yet won the kind of recognition needed to attract the attention of a wider public. A broad spectrum of media will be on view, ranging from painting and graphic art to sculpture, installations, photography, video-art and new-media art.
The CCCS invited four Italian curators and directors of some of the most relevant Italian contemporary art institutions to each nominate four artists. This Committee comprised: Luca Massimo Barbero (director, MACRO, Rome ), Chiara Bertola (director, HangarBicocca, Milan ), Andrea Bruciati (director, Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea, Monfalcone) and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio (director, GAMEC, Bergamo).
The work of the 16 candidates will come before an international jury composed of Achim Borchardt-Hume (Whitechapel Gallery, London ), Kelly Gordon ( Hirshhorn Museum , Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC ) and Adam Szymczyk (Kunsthalle Basel). Rather than being based on the choice of any single work, the panel’s decision rests on an analysis of the various creative avenues explored by the artist, taking into consideration his/her consistency, maturity, originality and impact. The prize will be a monographic publication devoted to the oeuvre of the winner, to be published by Silvana Editoriale, who will also produce the exhibition catalogue.
The artists nominated by Luca Massimo Barbero are: Alessandro Ceresoli (Romano di Lombardia, Bergamo, 1975), whose work, ranging from video-art to drawing, merges social action with historical reconstruction, or revisits literary sources and iconographic elements of varying origins; Valentino Diego (Ciriè, Turin, 1978), whose site-specific installations built with everyday materials often used in industrial construction work play with space and with our conventional forms of perception; Giovanni Ozzola (Florence, 1982), who uses photography and video to capture fleeting moments and rarified atmospheres in which an endless play of light creates evocative, suspended environments; and Antonio Rovaldi (Parma, 1975), whose multifaceted research is based on exploring the border between the physical and the mental, between the real and the imaginary in experiments in space and time based either on the artist’s own life experience or offered directly to his audience.
Chiara Bertola has proposed: Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982), who uses herself as the measure of urban and natural space, implementing a process involving the subjective construction and interpretation of place and of experience; Loredana Di Lillo (Gioia del Colle, Bari, 1979), who adopts a variety of different techniques, from drawing and collage to sculpture, to explore themes linked to the history and memory of self and of Western culture; the duo Invernomuto (Turin, 1982 and 1983), whose transmedial artistic experimentation teeters on the border between reality and the world of dreams; and Margherita Moscardini (Donoratico, Livorno, 1981), whose work can be described as the analytical portrayal of places and memories of spaces.
Andrea Bruciati has chosen: Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice, 1979), whose work is based on situations that straddle the border between participatory operation and direct architectural intervention; Riccardo Benassi (Cremona, 1982), whose installations act on sensations and the encounter between sound and matter; Luca Francesconi (Mantova, 1979), whose sculptural work draws on the shapes and symbols of tradition in an anthropological dimension, composing objects that hark back to the sacred rituals of agriculture and grassroots culture; and Alberto Tadiello (Montecchio Maggiore, Vicenza, 1983), whose work combines a reflection on the relationship between sculpture and technology, with an interest in the sculptural dimension of sound.
Giacinto Di Pietrantonio has put forward: Meris Angioletti (Bergamo, 1977), whose interest lies in exploring the fine line between art and science in her investigations into landscape and space, adopting an approach that combines scientific method with the creative process; Rossana Buremi (Augusta, Siracusa, 1975), whose works are an ironic take on erotic iconography, exploring such themes as today’s obsession with the human body and the related senses of guilt and awareness; Patrizio Di Massimo (Jesi, Ancona, 1983), who uses a stratification of artistic vocabularies as a tool for reflecting on history and his own identity; and Luigi Presicce (Porto Cesareo, Lecce, 1976), a performance artist who combines the theatrical and the ritual in an ongoing allusion to grassroots culture.
