Debora Garritani, Monica Mazzone, Alessandro Nanni are the winners of the tenth VAF Prize, awarded on September 27 2024 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 and Denis Viva assigned a lifetime achievement award to Marcello Morandini. ‘The VAF Prize stands out for its research and the love it reserves for young artists. It is a projection of Volker W. Feierabend’s sensitivity, taste and instinct, which is confirmed in retrospect by the critics’ choices that accompany his passion for the art of the Italian twentieth century and for the artists of the latest generations on whom the judgement has yet to be made. Feierabend owes much to the Mart, which has welcomed his collection and enhanced it; and the Mart owes much to Feierabend, who has found a home for his paintings in the museum. For me, the fact that, after Kiel, the organisation of the Prize has its headquarters at the Mart is confirm of a relationship that is now historic and a source of pride for the commitment that the selection of the competitors and the choice of the prize-winners entail, in the surprise of knowing unknown personalities. With this spirit I shared the Founder’s desire to host the Prize in the museum rooms enlivened by the fundamental works of so many 20th century masters belonging to the VAF Foundation, so that new works by young artists can coexist and share the same spaces’.

Vittorio Sgarbi, President Mart

First prize Debora Garritani Born in Crotone in 1983. After obtaining a high school diploma in science, she undertook legal studies 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 later a second-level academic diploma in photography. She began exhibiting in Italy and abroad in 2012; in 2013 she was a finalist at the Co. Co Como Contemporary Contest; in 2014 she held her first solo exhibition at Studio d’arte Cannaviello in Milan and was admitted to the final selections of the Cairo Prize. In 2017, a new solo exhibition at Studio d’arte Cannaviello. In her artistic research, she tackles the existential themes that characterise contemporary society, including the labile border 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 handcrafted construction of the environments, the aesthetic research decidedly set 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 of creating ‘rooms of wonders that fluctuate between truth and illusion in an effect of persistent ambiguity between nature and dream’.

Second Prize Monica Mazzone (Milan, 1984) Mazzone studied 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 artist-in-residence at the NARS Foundation in New York, 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 are translated into ‘object-images’, i.e. paintings, drawings and sculptures that combine two- and three-dimensionality. Mazzone participates independently in the revision and questioning of the fixed points of abstract art that has been taking place in recent years. In the words of Professor Denis Viva: “The end result is an inextricable combination of control and unpredictability, balance and dynamism, sharpness and polysemy. […] The body is indistinguishable from geometry, time from product, execution from psychic involvement”.

Third Prize Alessandro Nanni (Carpegna, 1991) After graduating in Modern Literature from the University of Bologna, in 2016 Nanni graduated in Photography of Cultural Heritage at the ISIA in Urbino. He then began collaborating with Paolo Semprucci in the field of architectural and cultural heritage photography and with Simone Casetta in the field of analogue fine-art printing. Since 2017, he has been delving into the fundamentals of the dramaturgy of the western image with Giovanni Chiaramonte, whose teaching assistant he is in the Theory, History and Technique of Photography course at the IULM in Milan. Since 2018, he has been photo editor of the international art history magazine “Arte Cristiana” (Milan) and lecturer in Photography at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. Described in the catalogue by Elena Pontiggia, Nanni’s works are fragments. There is nothing anecdotal about them, they could belong anywhere. Yet Nanni’s work resembles no other, “the artist captures almost imperceptible signs and traces, in a kind of lyrical minimalism, where however it is the light of a pale yellow or misty white that reveals that nothing is minimal. Because there is nothing that cannot be illuminated”.

Career Prize Marcello Morandini (Mantua, 1940) One of the artists most present in the Foundation’s art collection and well-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 20th century, which was the century of doubt, of the Socratic awareness of our not knowing. There is also shadow in the light of his works” writes Elena Pontiggia in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. “His are metaphysical chessboards, Pythagorean tables of being and non-being, luminous constructions in which darkness lurks, albeit levitated and paradoxically shining”. Now in its tenth edition, the VAF Prize is awarded every two years by the German Foundation to young Italian artists under 40. As was the case in 2019, the Italian venue of the VAF Prize is at the Mart. On the occasion of the inauguration, the names of the winners were announced. In fact, the project forecast a first stage at the Stadtgalerie in Kiel from 15 June to 1 September 2024 and then arriving at Mart from 28th September 2024 to 9th February 2025. The pre-selection of the artists, carried out for the first time on the digital platform of the Foundation’s website, allowed over a hundred applications to be evaluated and after a careful examination of the various artistic positions, the Scientific Committee of the VAF Foundation chose the names of the 13 finalists for the exhibition: Adriano Annino, Antonio Barbieri, Chiara Calore, Valentina Diena, Roberto Fanari, Debora Garritani, Teresa Giannico, Jacopo Ginanneschi, Monica Mazzone, Alessandro Nanni, Davide Quartucci, Michele Tajariol, Beatrice Taponecco. As for the last edition, the VAF Foundation awarded a first prize worth 15,000 euros, a second prize worth 7,500 euros and a third prize worth 5,000 euros. In addition to the cash prize, the winner will be entitled to the acquisition of the competing work, which will become part of the VAF Foundation Collection. The exhibition is completed by the publication of a catalogue in a trilingual edition, Italian, German and English, documenting all the works on show. The publisher is Manfredi.

Introduction on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition “X. Premio Fondazione VAF. Current Positions in Italian Art”, on 14th June 2024 in the Stadtgalerie Kiel Dear City President Aust, dear Honorary Consul Meyer, dear Mr Volker Feierabend, dear Mr Thorsten Feierabend, dear artists from Italy, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would also like to personally welcome the President of the Mart – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Professor Vittorio Sgarbi and, on behalf of the Board of Trustees of the VAF Foundation, the Chairwoman Elena Pontiggia, who has travelled here today from Milan. The Board of Trustees is not only responsible for the selected artists and works, but has also placed its trust in me to place the works here in the building together with my colleagues and also to introduce the content this evening.  This year we are showing the competition exhibition for the Premio Fondazione VAF for the 8th time. It is an exhibition that focuses on Italy and aims to make Italian fine art better known in Germany. Not only against the backdrop of increasing nationalistic tendencies in Europe and the entire world and the appropriation of art for political ideologies or camps, it seems important to me to repeat a few sentences that I already spoke two years ago at the opening of the IX Premio Fondazione VAF from this stage: At a time when national borders are increasingly taking centre stage in politically motivated discourses, we can and should ask ourselves to what extent geographical and national borders can serve as determinants of a cultural or artistic space, or whether they should at all. Global digitalisation and ever shorter distances suggest that different artistic formulations are also moving closer together to form an all-encompassing visual-artistic language. Local focal points and themes are merging with international aspects and discourses. Differences between different countries seem to be levelling out, perhaps even dissolving. The last two major world exhibitions of contemporary art, the Documenta and the Venice Biennale, show that this is a fallacy. Both have made it their goal to put the production of art in the so-called global South centre stage. An important and overdue endeavour, but also a sign that there are still hierarchies and supremacist positions within the global art world that can also be traced back to geographical attributions and world orders based on them. This leads to the idea that stereotypical ideas and categorisations still exist when looking at different countries, cultural areas and religions. A prize such as the Premio Fondazione VAF, which chooses national borders as a criterion, but at the same time transcends these borders and shows the selected artistic positions in another country, also enables these multifaceted and multi-layered views in addition to viewing art. For me, it is also symbolic of the fact that crossing borders, mediation and communication are fundamental means of getting to the bottom of such stereotyping and, in the best case, preventing it. For even if the country of Italy forms the framework of this exhibition, we should not lose sight of the fact that all the works are individual artistic formulations that are based on independent cultural influences. The individual works give us the opportunity to overcome any mental boundaries and attributions and to focus on the individual positions. Fourteen positions can be seen in the exhibition opening today. Thirteen young artists and one honorary prize, the so-called “Career prize”, which this year is being awarded to the artist Marcello Morandini, born in Mantua in 1940. I am delighted that we have this opportunity to show works by this internationally important protagonist of concrete art. The fact that he was represented with works at the Documenta in 1977 also speaks in favour of his importance. Morandini’s works form an interplay of light and shadow, of lines and surfaces, which still captivates today with its great formal clarity.  But let me come to the young positions in this exhibition and begin the imaginary tour through the exhibition rooms. Right at the beginning, you are greeted by wire sculptures and reliefs. Roberto Fanari, born in 1984 in Cagliari, Sardinia, now lives in Milan. His work is characterised by the close interlocking of line, space and figure. Iron wire is his main material, with which he explores questions of form, the three-dimensional figure and drawing. At the same time, we recognise in these figures an examination of Western pictorial traditions. He thus chooses the classical free-standing figurative sculpture, the relief or the form of the tapestry as the medium of his depiction. His own person always plays a role in finding the motif. For example, he sees the relief “La mia casa è una fortezza” as a representation of his house. Or the work “Sana me” as a self-portrait, which depicts him as a warrior with fish scale and chain armour on his head and arms. Three niches in the armour are filled with medicines as a symbol of today’s protective armour. Incidentally, these are strongly reminiscent of the veneration of relics and the associated promises of salvation in Christian culture since the Middle Ages at the latest. And even hellfire seems to spread along the lower edge of the sculpture. In the same room you will find the works of Teresa Giannico. Born in Bari in southern Italy in 1985, she also lives in Milan today. With her works, we take a leap into the current possibilities of digital image production. What at first glance looks like classical paintings, turns out at second glance to be digital drawings based on digital collage techniques. Her motifs are classic motifs from the history of Western painting: landscape, interior, still life, individual and group portraits. She digitally breaks down images she has collected from the internet and social media into individual small photo fragments, which she then reassembles into new images. It seems to be an attempt to deconstruct our pictorial traditions and critically scrutinise their automatic continuation. We have chosen her portrait of three young men as the paradigmatic title motif for this year’s annual programme. Here in the exhibition, it now hangs on the exposed display wall opposite the entrance to our exhibition rooms, visible from afar. Next to this portrait you will find works by Michele Tajariol, born in Pordenone in 1985. “Corpo Estraneo” are masks moulded from seat belts. As worn by the artist himself in the photographs, they oscillate between protection and constriction, between security and constraint. At the same time, they pose questions to the subject of the artist and thus also to the freedom of art in general. Another mask forms the starting point of the diptych “Fake Face”: the artist has pulled a mask, consisting of a photo collage of various parts of his face, over his own face in order to generate a photographic portrait of himself. The artistic self as an assimilation of fragments of others.  From these identity-political works we come to the constructive works of Monica Mazzone. Born in Milan in 1984, she now lives in Milan and New York. Her abstractions are the result of the most precise calculations, in which the rules of geometry are taken as a guiding principle. It is the desire to visualise emotional states and transform them into a puzzle of abstract surfaces, geometric shapes and flawless colour gradients. Formally similar, but nevertheless in complete contrast, are the concrete works of the honourable mention winner Marcello Morandini in the adjacent studio.  Dear audience, in the context of the Premio Fondazion VAF exhibitions, I am repeatedly asked whether I can identify something typically Italian, something special that keeps cropping up in these exhibitions. One characteristic is certainly the way they deal with and explicitly analyse classical Western art history and its pictorial traditions. If you like, with Jacopo Ginanneschi and Chiara Calore in the cabinet in front of the Heinrich Ehmsen Foundation’s rooms, we have two representatives who deal decidedly with the visual language of classical Western painting: Jacopo Ginanneschi was born in 1987 in Castel del Piano in Tuscany, where he still lives and works today. His paintings bear witness to his preference for Tuscan painting of the 13th and 14th centuries. This can be seen in the technique alone, in which he applies the oil paint after applying rabbit glue and plaster to the wooden support. The motifs clearly show the combination of Christian allegorical themes and historical architecture with contemporary figures and spaces. Chiara Calore, born in Abano Terme in 1984, now lives in Venice. In her large-format paintings, she draws on motifs from well-known paintings such as Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” or Ingres’ “La grande odalisque”, combining them with other motifs to create hybrid pictorial spaces. It is an opulent painting that challenges us to decode these hybrid pictorial worlds. From naïve cave paintings to liquid forms of digital representations, everything that our art history and visual culture has to offer seems to be included. And not in a purely arbitrary manner, but assembled into aesthetically composed paintings. Another cabinet in our exhibition focuses on the hyper-realistic drawings by Valentina Diena, who was born in Milan in 1996 and still lives and works in the city today. Drawn with precise craftsmanship using coloured pencil on paper, her everyday objects seem to be examined in the most minute detail. She uses a pair of red Doc Martens boots, a typewriter or a squeezed-out tube of paint to explore questions of the fetishisation of objects in the form of exaggeration and exaggeration. References to Pop Art and American Hyperrealism are clearly recognisable here. The use of marble is certainly a must in an exhibition of Italian art. Beatrice Taponecco, born in Sarzana in 1987, now lives in the small village of Pulica, not far from where the world-famous Carrara marble is quarried. Natural elements serve as inspiration for her sculptures, which she creates from a wide variety of marble types. The rough stone is transformed by her sculptural treatment into a fine sculpture that plays with light, form, smoothness, roughness, solidity and fragility. In the same room are the paintings of the youngest participant in this exhibition. Born in Senigallia in 2000, Davide Quartucci now lives between Senigallia and Milan, where he studies painting at the Academia di Belle Arti di Brera. He transports us into a fictional world with mystical mythical creatures that examine and observe nature in an almost melancholy way, focussing on the smallest detail, be it a mushroom, an ant hill or a small hole in the ground.  One room further on, Alessandro Nanni’s photographs also take a close look at their surroundings. In the tradition of documentary photography, he shows us his view of his home town of Carpegna in Montefeltro, central Italy, where he was born in 1991. Now living in Milan, he has a distanced view of the place and shows us photographs that run counter to the views of the area that circulate on the internet, for example: 15th century palaces and landscapes reminiscent of Renaissance harmony. Instead, we look at abruptly interrupted streets, desolate courtyards with chickens, pheasants or dog kennels or formal shadow plays on barren surfaces. Opposite are the paintings of Adriano Annino. Born in Naples in 1983, he also lives in Milan today. His paintings appear to be documentations of his everyday surroundings. Insights into the artist’s private surroundings. On closer inspection, you will notice that elements of the individual paintings reappear in the others. In the medium of painting, a more photographic understanding of the image is expressed here, which combines the snapshot-like quality of the snapshot with the painted still life. We find ourselves here in the hall of mirrors of images, caught in the continuous loop of our visual culture. The close connection between painting and photography can be found on another level in the works of Debora Garritani in the centre of our exhibition space. Born in 1983 in Crotone in Calabria, she also lives in Milan today. What appears to be painting is in fact photography. In this way, she ties in with a discourse that has been discussed time and again since the invention of photography. According to her own statements, she bases the creation of her photographs on the iconography of painting, in particular Renaissance, Flemish and Symbolist painting. She creates dream-like images in which the idea of vanitas always plays an undertone and resonates. Antonio Barbieri, born in Rho in Lombardy in 1985, now lives in Grosseto in Tuscany. The titles of his works already show that he draws inspiration for his sculptures from natural forms or depicts them directly. He uses these to create geometric and almost fairytale-like sculptures with the help of digital technologies and 3D printing, which are located somewhere between natural and technoid structures. They are by no means threatening, but rather captivate with their playful, almost childlike monumentality. As you can see, this year’s Premio Fondazione VAF exhibition once again brings together a wide variety of artistic approaches and themes. In conclusion, I would like to point out that this exhibition is only a small selection of the current art scene in Italy. As you will have noticed from the places of residence mentioned in my speech, the majority of the artists represented in this exhibition live in Milan and northern Italy. Unfortunately, the disparity between northern and southern Italy still seems to exist. Finally, I would like to thank everyone involved in the realisation of the exhibition here at the Stadtgalerie Kiel. Especially my team. For their commitment, calmness and professional management of the hurdles involved in setting up such an exhibition. First and foremost Sönke Kniphals, who had the challenging task of organising the content of the works of art, which were unknown to him until three or four weeks ago. You will see that he has succeeded very well and has created an exciting tour through Italian art. I would also like to thank Stephan Tresp, who, together with his team, is responsible for the practical installation of the art in our rooms. Namely, these are: Hans Golz, Sebastian Scherl, Sascha Kayser, Timo Milke, Erik Aaderma, Gerret Scholz, Dennis Paulsen and our FSJ volunteer Anouk Matezki. And last but not least, I would like to thank the artists for their thoughts and visual imagery and, last but not least, Simona Di Giovannantonio, who was once again a competent contact person for all questions on the Italian side this year. I would like to thank you, dear audience, for your attention and wish you a pleasant evening at the Stadtgalerie Kiel. Dr Peter Kruska Director of the Stadtgalerie Kiel

Dott. Peter Kruska

Direttore della Stadtgalerie Kiel

The VAF Foundation is very pleased to announce that the first stage of the tenth edition of the ‘VAF Foundation Prize’ will be held at the Stadtgalerie in Kiel, Germany, from 15 June to 1 September 2024. The pre-selection of artists, carried out for the first time on the digital platform of the Foundation’s website, enabled over a hundred applications to be evaluated and after a careful examination of the various artistic positions, the Scientific Committee of the VAF Foundation chose the names of the 13 finalists for the exhibition: Adriano Annino, Antonio Barbieri, Chiara Calore, Valentina Diena, Roberto Fanari, Debora Garritani, Teresa Giannico, Jacopo Ginanneschi, Monica Mazzone, Alessandro Nanni, Davide Quartucci, Michele Tajariol, Beatrice Taponecco. Alongside the prize for young artists, the VAF-Stiftung will also award a Lifetime Achievement Prize this year, restricted to artists documented in the Foundation’s large, encyclopaedic collection of Italian art. A tribute to long-standing artists that this year will present the works in the VAF collection of Marcello Morandini, an artist, architect, designer and one of the most important representatives of Concrete Art in Europe. On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalogue will be published in a trilingual Italian, German and English edition documenting all the works on show. The first German stage will be followed by the second exhibition of the exhibition at the Mart, the museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto, during which the eagerly awaited award ceremony for the winning artists will be held. President VAF Foundation Thorsten A. Feierabend Scientific Committee: Elena Pontiggia (President), Gabriella Belli, Nicoletta Colombo, Volker W. Feierabend, Serena Redaelli, Denis Viva Catalogue: Manfredi editions:

X Premio. Fondazione VAF

    Stadtgalerie Kiel: https://www.kiel.de/de/kultur_freizeit/stadtgalerie/ Opening: 14 June 2024 Opening to the public: 15. 06 – 01. 09. 2024