Debora Garritani, Monica Mazzone, Alessandro Nanni are the winners of the tenth VAF Award, assigned on September 27 at the Mart in Rovereto. On the same occasion, the Scientific Committee composed by Elena Pontiggia, Gabriella Belli, Nicoletta Colombo, Volker W. Feierabend, Serena Redaelli, Denis Viva awarded a lifetime achievement award to Marcello Morandini.

“The VAF Award stands out for its research and the love it reserves for young artists. It is a projection of the sensitivity, taste and instinct of Volker W. Feierabend, which finds confirmation in retrospect in the choices of critics who accompany his passion for twentieth-century Italian art and for artists of the latest generations on whom the judgment has not yet been defined.

Feierabend owes a lot to the Mart that welcomed his collection, enhancing it; and the Mart owes a lot to Feierabend who found a home for his paintings in the museum. That, after Kiel, the organization of the Prize is based at the Mart is for me the confirmation of a relationship that is now historic and a source of pride for the commitment that the selection of competitors and the choice of winners entail, in the surprise of meeting personalities who were unknown until now.

With this spirit I shared the Founder's desire to welcome the Prize in the rooms of the museum enlivened by the fundamental works of many twentieth-century masters belonging to the VAF Foundation, so that the new works of young artists coexist and share the same spaces"

Vittorio Sgarbi, President of the Mart

First prize

Debora Garritani

Born in Crotone in 1983. After obtaining a high school diploma in science, she began studying law at the University of Parma, which she abandoned to study at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where she obtained a first level academic diploma in painting and then a second level diploma in photography. She began exhibiting in Italy and abroad in 2012; in 2013 she was a finalist at the Co. Co. Co Como Contemporary Contest; in 2014 she held her first solo exhibition at the Studio d’arte Cannaviello in Milan and was admitted to the final selections of the Cairo Prize. In 2017, a new solo exhibition at the Studio d’arte Cannaviello. In her artistic research she addresses the existential themes that characterize contemporary society, including the labile boundary between reality and fiction, between natural and artificial, the rediscovery of the sense of waiting in a society dominated by consumerism, and the daily impact with fears amplified after the recent pandemic.

The refined technique of photographic printing on cotton paper, the work on the self-portrait as an introspective investigation, the artisanal construction of the environments, the aesthetic research decidedly immersed in the present but with continuous references to past iconography, are some of the elements that convinced the jury to award Garritani.

Nicoletta Colombo writes in the exhibition catalogue that Garritani is able to create “rooms of wonder that fluctuate between truth and illusion in an effect of persistent ambiguity between nature and dream”.

Second Prize
Monica Mazzone

(Milan, 1984) trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and the IED in Milan. She currently teaches Chromatology at the Aldo Galli Academy in Como. She has been an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in New York, the MASS MoCA in North Adams and Lac o le Mon Foundation in Salento. She conducts her research on the possibility of visually expressing and perceiving the obsession for perfection, having geometry as a guiding principle. Her works translate into “Object-Images”, that is, paintings, drawings and sculptures that combine two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality.

Mazzone participates autonomously in the revision and questioning of the fixed points of abstract art, which has been underway in recent years. In the words of Professor Denis Viva: “The final result is an inextricable combination of control and unpredictability, balance and dynamism, clarity and polysemy. […] The body is indistinguishable from geometry, time from the product, execution from psychic involvement”

Third Prize

Alessandro Nanni

(Carpegna, 1991) after graduating in Modern Literature from the University of Bologna, in 2016 he graduated in Photography of Cultural Heritage at the ISIA in Urbino. He then began to collaborate with Paolo Semprucci in the field of architectural and cultural heritage photography and with Simone Casetta in the field of fine-art analog printing. Since 2017 he has been studying the foundations of the dramaturgy of the Western image with Giovanni Chiaramonte, of whom he is teaching assistant in the course of Theory, history and technique of photography at the course of Television, cinema and new media at the IULM in Milan. Since 2018 he has been photo editor of the international art history magazine “Arte Cristiana” (Milan) and is a professor of Photography at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan.

Described in the catalog by Elena Pontiggia, Nanni's works are fragments. There is nothing anecdotal, they could belong to any place. Yet Nanni's work is unlike any other, "the artist captures almost imperceptible signs and traces, in a sort of lyrical minimalism, where however it is the light of a pale yellow or a foggy white that reveals that nothing is minimal. Because there is nothing that cannot be illuminated".

Lifetime Achievement Award

Marcello Morandini (Mantua, 1940)

Among the artists most present in the Foundation's art collection and known to the public and German critics, he is one of the protagonists of concrete art.

Morandini "fully belongs to the century in which he was born, the twentieth century, which was the century of doubt, of the Socratic awareness of our not knowing. There is also the shadow in the light of his works" writes Elena Pontiggia in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. “His are metaphysical chessboards, Pythagorean tables of being and non-being, luminous constructions in which darkness nests, albeit levitated and paradoxically luminous”