Siedlecki Namsal
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."
Namsal Siedlecki lives and works in Seggiano (GR).
In 2015 he won the fourth edition of the Moroso Prize and the Cy Twombly Italian Affiliated Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome, and the Gamec Prize at the Gamec Museum in Bergamo in 2019.
His most recent exhibitions include:
#80 #90, Villa Medici, Rome (2019);
6th Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2018);
Titolo IV, Villa Romana, Florence (2016);
Integument, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin (2016);
TU35, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2015);
Così Accade, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2014);
Crisalidi, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (2013).
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.