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, which was 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.

As in the last edition, the VAF Foundation will award 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.

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 long-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 editionshttps://marettimanfredi.it

Stadtgalerie Kiel:

https://www.kiel.de/de/kultur_freizeit/stadtgalerie/

Opening: 14 June 2024

Opening to the public: 15 June – 1 September 2024

Introduction on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition ‘X. VAF Foundation Prize. Current Positions of Italian Art’, on 14 June 2024 at the Stadtgalerie in 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, Mr 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 focusses 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.

14 positions can be seen in the exhibition opening today. 13 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

ARTICLE BY VITTORIO SGARBI – PANORAMA – 26.06.2024

THE VAF STIFTUNG FOUNDATION HONOURS THE LONG CAREER OF ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER MARCELLO MORANDINI, AND TOGETHER THE MOST INTERESTING YOUNG ARTISTS IN OUR COUNTRY. THEIR WORKS ARE ON DISPLAY IN GERMANY AND SOON IN OUR COUNTRY.

In the Stadtgalerie in Kiel, Germany, the award for a historic artist Italian, for his long-standing work as a rigorous architect and designer, who found the jurors of a youth award, the Stiftung: I am referring to Marcello Morandini, who is a shining example among many young people, one of whom is only 24 years old, who are competing in the gallery’s large spaces.

But at the same time, and in front of them, a friend must also be honoured. A friend from Italy, a German more Italian than an Italian, Volker Feierabend, who lives in Milan, was born in Berlin, and who exalts the greatness of Italian art, also in dialogue with the great German art, in the place where the museum that I preside over is located and which is the home of the works he has collected: the Mart in Rovereto.

This is balanced between a small and beautiful museum, the Mag di Riva on Lake Garda, and Trento, where the Castello delBuonconsiglio is the institution that in a few days will host a Dürer exhibition.

I wanted that, at the same time as Dürer’s exhibition, there would be a parallel exhibition at the Mag of Italian Renaissance painters who worked in Trentino, in the wake of Mantegna, in dialogue with the great German artist who found one of his places of vision in Arco, descending along the Trentino

to Venice. So the encounter between the Italian and German Renaissance will in a few days be a good reason for German friends to come to Italy and arrive in Trentino. And this is a story that has a modern interpreter in Volker Feierabend who has felt strongly about 20th century Italian painting to the point of being, now at an age of full understanding and experience, sensitive even to the youngest, to whom he feels he must give, with his foundation and his award, the attention of those who are not only linked to the great artists who united Italy and Germany, such as Giorgio De Chirico or Giorgio Morandi, but to all those who have been forgotten and whom we are celebrating today, in one, in the figure of Pietro Gaudenzi, a wonderful as well as unknown painter of whom the MART is currently hosting an exhibition.

The honour that I must pay to my friend Volker is precisely for his willingness to look deeply into the experience that gave light to his life, of the painters who worked alongside De Chirico, Savinio and Morandi, now rediscovered as Ubaldo Oppi or Gaudenzi himself; and, from them, in the collection that he has collected with passion and rigour, to the young people that he proposes in Kiel, and that I will try to describe, and who will be awarded in Rovereto, and I do not know how strongly the commission will be able to choose one instead of two, instead of three, with respect to the evidence of the commitment that characterises them all, for their passion, their hope, and with the same spirit of those who wanted them.

I am thinking, for example, with some astonishment, of an artist who moves in a linguistic quest without immediate direct references, Roberto Fanari, who, among those who inspired him, recalls not only the usual and predictable Arturo Martini, but a rare Sardinian artist called Nivola. I was very struck by this reference of his in his dialogue with Volker, who speaks to the young man – born in 1984 in Sardinia – and asks him which masters he loves most and to whom he feels closest. And Fanari replies: ‘I look mainly to the great sculptors, but also to a lot of painting. To name a few: Arturo Martini, Costantino Nivola, Marino Marini, Carlo Carrà, Felice Casorati, Adolfo Wildt, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Sandro Botticelli, Duccio di Boninsegna and Giotto’.

As if to say that all Italian art leads to the elaboration, with metal segments, of forms, which are no longer generated by drawing, but generate it. And this process reminded me of an extraordinary Italian artist, an architect to whom we owe the recovery of some of the most important monuments of ancient and mediaeval Italian archaeology, by the name of Edoardo Tressoldi, whom I am convinced Fanari knows and whom I would also point out to my friend Volker, who could be the recipient of a prize in the future having reconstructed archaeology with the transparency of wires, exactly like those Fanari uses, to identify spaces that remain virtual despite being physical. The connection that came naturally to me between Fanari and Tressoldi shows how in many young people there is an attention to a history that is the very meaning of our great ancient and modern civilisation.

Similarly, as an interpenetration between the collections of the Kiel museum and the works of an artist of great sensitivity, Chiara Calore, in the exhibition you realise that the language has changed, but it is not a new artist in the competition. It is an artist from another generation, called Henrik Ehmsen, who has his paintings in dialogue with those of Calore.

They are seventy, eighty years apart, the works of this German artist from those of the Italian, but it seems natural that the two have the same feeling for the great Italian tradition, even the German, and this struck me, and inevitably Calore, who already has a career of her own, fresh but malto recognised.

Remarkable and classic, even in traditional techniques is the research of a very young artist like Jacopo Ginanneschi, which made me think of a perhaps unintentional affinity with Riccardo Francalancia, and with Adelchi Riccardo Mantovani, well known and supported by Feierabend in the symmetrical and reversed experience: Adelchi from Ferrara went to live in Berlin and his friend Volker from Berlin went to live in Milan. And, with the references to this realist and imaginative artist who brings his great city, which is also my city, Ferrara, to Germany, one recognises the connections with Francalancia, and, in a broader sense, with an American artist with an inevitable relationship with Italian art: Grant Wood.

Similar candour, but in an exclusively photographic research, between Guido Guidi and Giovanni Chiaramonte, shows Alessandro Nanni, in original and almost abstract cuts. In a diametrically opposite direction, on the other hand, with photography regenerates painting, Renaissance, Flemish and Symbolist, transferred to a new life, Debora Garritani, a cultured and astute artist.

The reflections I make in front of these young artists are such that they establish an innate tradition of which Italy is in any case the heart, because Italian art is at the centre of the world with respect to both French art and Spanish art.

French art, Spanish art and American art. And in this it is interesting to observe the research of Valentina Diena, who, unable to avoid confrontation with Pop art, like all Italian artists who seemed suddenly overwhelmed by this popular, consumerist art but also denouncing capitalism, finds her own original way. Valentina proposes a relationship with Pop art through drawing, a drawn Pop art.

It is certainly another path that links the past to the present: in the Italian tradition, drawing is the key with which one understands, through reason and thought, the world. drawing, in Tuscan civilisation, from Giotto to Botticelli, is rrùsura and order. Reducing Pop art to the order of reason is certainly Valentina Diena’s intuition.

It moves in the sphere of sculpture, in a very close relationship with a 20th century master, whom I don’t know Volker has ever met, Beatrice Taponecco. I have known him well, I have seen him in his very high years, he died at the age of one hundred, he worked in Carrara, and he created a marble sculpture that is abstract yet linked to the forms of nature: he is Gigi Guadagnucci. Taponecco, who was born in Sarzana, not far from Carrara, where there are the great marble quarries, seems to want to continue Guadagnucci’s experience with her enterprise, keeping it so current and alive that he became a young contemporary and she a preserver of that youthfulness, also through the testimony of so many artists in Carrara, such as Paolo Atchugarry,

Guadagnucci’s continuator. In the abstract sphere, with impeccable rigour in the exercise of drawing, the virtuoso Monica Mazzone stands out. Let’s see how many chains and links the young artists exhibited in Kiel work together. Another who works between photographic images and Hannibal-like masks, like foreign bodies, is Michele Tajarol, who is perhaps unfamiliar with the production so akin to him of Herbert Pagani, to whom he involuntarily returns.

Pure and free painter, moving with the rhythm of music, is Adriano Annino, while Teresa Giannico achieves pictorial effects with the decomposition of digital images.

Even more radically, Antonio Barbieri creates natural forms, like lichens, through printing3 D, with ceramic-like effects: a second nature.

A lonely fantasy world of his own pursues the young Davide Quartucci. With exhibitions like this one, Volker Feierabend gives art critics and curators tools to get to know Italian art better.