20th Premio Cairo
Premio Cairo, curated by the editorial staff of Arte, the monthly magazine of Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori-Cairo Editore, reaches its 20th edition.
Appointment in the prestigious exhibition halls of the Palazzo Reale in Milan: to know the winner of the 2019 Premio Cairo and to see on show, from 21 to 27 November 2019, the works of the twenty artists under 40 selected by the editorial staff of Arte.
Selected artists
The Jury
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Il Vincitore
The winner is Namsal Siedlecki
From left, Michele Bonuomo, editor-in-chief of the monthly magazines Arte and Antiquariato, Urbano Cairo, President of Cairo Editore, Namsal Siedlecki, winner of the 20th Cairo Prize, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, President of the Prize jury, and Filippo Del Corno, Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Milan
Award-winning work
With Teste (Trevis Maponos), the sculpture in the competition, Namsal Siedlecki achieves a subtle synthesis between contemporary rituals and millenary secrets, giving a new expressive and conceptual dimension to some Gallo-Roman votive offerings. In the artist's vision, the votive figures left in the sacred areas of ancient temples are somehow comparable to the coins thrown into the Trevi Fountain in Rome: both have to do with ritual gestures and auspicious expressions.
For these reasons, in the galvanization process used in the making of the work, Siedlecki exploited precisely those coins that, for various reasons, cannot be converted to any other use. The three sculptures formally recall Henry Moore's soft lines and, although they belong to a timeless dimension, they maintain an inseparable link with the present, always remaining an active part of an ever-changing process: the oxidation of the copper, in fact, is beyond the artist's control. The contact of the metal with the oxygen in the air thus produces different physical reactions, dynamically altering the appearance of each of the three heads. Almost as if they were desires stuck in limbo, waiting to come true.
Award citation
Namsal Siedlecki won the 20th Premio Cairo; his work "Heads (Trevis Maponos)" was judged the best with this motivation: "The 2019 edition featured the participation of ten Italian artists and, for the first time, ten artists of different nationalities working in Italy. And on such an occasion the memory of ancient myths merges plastically with contemporary consumer rituals making sculpture a renewed alchemical process."