Giuliana Rosso

Winner 2023
Stiamo bene negli acquitrini, 2023,

carboncino e gessetti su carta, cm 160x200.

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.

Born in Chivasso (Turin) in 1992.

Lives and works in Turin

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