21th Premio Cairo
The 21st edition was held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and marked the restart of the Italian contemporary art world. Twenty promising young artists, selected by the Arte editorial team, exhibited their works in an unmissable exhibition. The jury, composed of art critics and museum directors, selected Giulia Cenci as the winner.
Thanks to the collaboration with LifeGate's Impatto Zero, which estimated the event's environmental impact by taking into account energy consumption, participants' mobility, promotional material, waste produced and meals consumed at the gala dinner, the CO2 emissions generated by the event were calculated, reduced and offset by means of carbon credits generated by the creation and protection of growing forests in Madagascar.
Renewed the media partnership with Corriere della Sera, which hosted the streaming of the event on corriere.it.
Follow the Instagram page @premiocairo to find out about the finalists and see highlights of the opening night.
A new, prestigious edition to reward the best new faces in contemporary art.
Selected artists
The Jury
The jury is chaired by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo - President Fondazione Patrizia Sandretto Re Re Rebaudengo of Turin. Joining her in the panel of jurors are: Mariolina Bassetti - President of Christie's Italia; Gabriella Belli - Art Historian, former Director of Fondazione MUVE, Musei Civici di Venezia; Luca Massimo Barbero - Director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation Institute of Art History in Venice; Ilaria Bonacossa - Director of the National Museum of Digital Art in Milan; Lorenzo Giusti - Director of Gamec (Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art) in Bergamo; Andrea Viliani - Director of the Museum of Civilisations in Rome.
The winner
Giulia Cenci wins the 21st Premio Cairo with the work ‘Untitled’, bathtub, resin, powder, pigments, 83.5x193.5x82.5 cm.
Born in Cortona in 1988, she trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and the St. Joost Academy in Breda, Holland. A finalist in the MAXXI Bulgari Prize 2020, her most important goals include the exhibitions Tallone di ferro at the Museo Novecento (Florence, 2021), Futuruins at Palazzo Fortuny (Venice, 2019) and her participation in the 59th Venice Art Biennale in 2022.
"Untitled"
Giulia Cenci, vincitrice del 21° Premio Cairo
Vasca da bagno, resina, polveri, pigmenti, cm 83,5x193,5x82,5.
Award-winning work
The protagonists of the works by Giulia Cenci (Cortona, 1988, lives in Amsterdam and Cortona) are disturbing hybridizations of man, animal and machinery. In the case of the work created for the Cairo Prize, Untitled, a wolf (the cast of a taxidermist's silhouette) is submerged in a whirlpool: its outstretched posture may recall that of a man enjoying refreshment, but also that of a lifeless or dead animal-and as an implication, a grotesque quotation from Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat winks out. The tank is "gutted" and allows glimpses of its inner components, its "skeleton," as if it too were an organism or as if it were part of a single body along with the wolf. With her usual use of salvaged materials combined with the cast technique, the artist pursues her reflection on "organic body and artificial body," as she explains.
"I am keen to explore the relationship with the machines we have created: they are our extensions, but at the same time we are subservient to them." Often organized in complex, whole-room installations, in this case in the form of a single sculptural/installation element, the artist's works court the macabre and paradoxical by prompting the viewer to question what he or she is seeing. The initial revulsion also leads to a mirroring in the work by the viewer, to questions about contemporary technological drift, the idea of underlying and explicit violence, but also about the resilience of the individual in a complex and in many ways hostile world.
Stefano Castelli
Award citation
"When the human condition is disrupted by a hostile and disturbing present, artists know how to make themselves lucid interpreters of reality. For being able to represent with formal power the encounter between living beings and technological mutations, between natural and artificial, between identity and otherness, the jury unanimously awards the 21st Premio Cairo to the work "Untitled" by Giulia Cenci." Her work won the prize of 25,000 euros.