22nd Premio Cairo
Premio Cairo, now in its 22nd edition, has confirmed itself over time as the most authoritative and prestigious opportunity for young artists in Italy. Born in 2000 out of President Urbano Cairo's desire to support young Italian artists and to acquaint the public with new protagonists, new trends and new languages in contemporary art research, it is now recognised as an important launching pad that offers artists the dual opportunity of consolidating their place on the national and international art scene and of living a great experience. Twenty young talents are selected year after year by the editorial staff of ARTE and are asked to create unpublished works for the occasion, assessed by a high-profile Jury composed of authoritative museum directors, critics and art historians and masters of Italian contemporary art.
The proclamation of the winning work was held on 9 October in the setting of the Museo della Permanente
Young artist Giuliana Rosso wins with her unpublished work "Stiamo bene negli acquitrini" (We are well in the marshes)
The winning work becomes part of the Cairo Prize Collection and its author is awarded a prize of €25,000.
The entire journey of the Premio Cairo 2023, with news and updates up to the announcement of the finalists and highlights of the opening night on 9 October, are available on the dedicated Instagram page @premiocairo.
Selected artists
The Jury
The jury is chaired by Emilio Isgrò - Artist. With him in the parterre of jurors: Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Giorgio Cini Foundation Institute of Art History in Venice; Mariolina Bassetti, Chairman Christie's Italia; Ilaria Bonacossa, Director of the National Museum
Digital Art in Milan; Lorenzo Giusti, Director of Gamec, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo;
Gianfranco Maraniello, Director of the Milan Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art Area.
The winner
Giuliana Rosso, born in Chivasso in 1992, carries out her artistic activity in Turin; her particular poetic approach leads her to deal with the theme of adolescence with great sensitivity, with its restlessness and uncertainties, as shown in the work realised for the Cairo Prize, in which three girls are portrayed in a ruined forest, amidst blackened or broken trunks, as if after a violent storm. The work, created using charcoal and chalk on paper, according to the jury's motivation, ‘represents the restlessness and indeterminacy of adolescence in a toxic landscape that evokes the urgency of the environmental issue and the discomfort of a common loneliness’.
Urbano Cairo, President of Cairo Editore; Giuliana Rosso, artist winner of the 22nd edition; Michele Bonuomo, Director of Arte; Emanuele Fiano, President of the Museo della Permanente.
carboncino e gessetti su carta, cm 160x200.
Award-winning work
If we could look inside that mystery that is adolescence, solidify its anxieties and uncertainties, we would be faced with the young and hybrid creatures that populate the works of Giuliana Rosso (Chivasso, 1992). In keeping with the artist's poetics, We're Fine in the Swamps, the work created for the Premio Cairo, shows us three girls who find themselves in a forest undone, amid blackened or broken logs, as if after a violent storm. The three figures appear close and at the same time enclosed in an intimate solitude, sealed by the devices they carry with them, namely the crystal headphones and the luminous computer, which also function as prostheses of their bodies. The sharp anatomy of the protagonists, as well as the predilection for bright yellows and greens, recall a master of Expressionism such as Ludwig Kirchner, although here the color traverses different lives in a single work, moving from the sharpest drafts along the trunks to almost vanishing among the stalks of marshy grass. It is pointless to try to distinguish sharply between figures and background, human and nonhuman: as in all of Rosso's works, the line of the drawing is a permeable boundary, the porous threshold of a continuous exchange between inside and outside, reality and imagination, thus restoring to us that human indeterminacy that emerges vividly during adolescence, but is then part of each of us.
Giulia Oglialoro
Award citation
The work, created through charcoal and chalk on paper, according to the jury's motivation "represents the restlessness and indeterminacy of adolescence in a toxic landscape that evokes the urgency of the environmental issue and the discomfort of a common loneliness." The young artist won the 25,000 euro prize and her work becomes part of Premio Cairo Collection.