Cairo 2022 Award, Giulia Cenci’s wolf wins – Corriere.it

Giulia Cenci the winner of the XXI edition of the Cairo Prize for Contemporary Art. Her work, which looks like a gray wolf of resin quartered in a whirlpool tub, was chosen on Monday evening 10 October, at Palazzo Reale in Milan, by a jury chaired by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, president of the homonymous Turin Foundation and composed by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Cini Foundation ; Mariolina Bassetti, chairman of Christie’s Italia; Gabriella Belli, director of the Civic Museums of Venice; Ilaria Bonacossa, director of the National Museum of Digital Art in Milan; Lorenzo Giusti, director of the Modern Art Gallery of Bergamo; Andrea Viliani, director of the Museum of Civilizations in Rome and by the master Emilio Isgrò. For the jury, unanimously, at a time when the human condition is upset by a hostile present, the artists have become interpreters of reality and Cenci “Has been able to represent with formal power the encounter between living beings and technological mutations, between natural and artificial, between identity and otherness ».

Overall, the zoomorphic figures constituted a possible collective narrative of the works selected by the magazine «Arte», directed by Michele Bonuomo, for the Cairo Prize. In the world map Unclean by Bruno Fantelli we have to imagine the origin of times with monstrous animals that emerge and then are born with Mayan-style snake heads in the work of Cecilia Granara. Therefore they are configured in the zoomorphs of Marta Spagnoli (which refer to the famous maps of Opicino de Canistris studied by Warburg’s students), they stabilize in the evocative Cow on hot ice by Thomas Braida and finally decocted mammals and sea monsters fall apart in the Dusk by Giulio Malinverni or die as perturbing leftovers of post-industrial society right in the award-winning whirlpool (Untitled) by Giulia Cenci. I believe this rise and fall of the Animal Empire, kind of Wagnerian and tragic Ringstrikes the contemporary imagination even of the observers more than abstract or informal works also for their reference to medieval or Flemish painting from collective imagination.

However, the zoomorphic one is not the only interpretation of the kaleidoscopic proposal of the award. Ludus florens by Diego Scecchini refers to the mainstream theme of beautiful (masculine) fluidity with a sculpture almost Thorvaldsen-like but made with a 3D printer while theAtlas Ego by Luca Di Luzio depicts the explosion / implosion of ourselves and of worlds dominated by identity. Then there is the universe of objects that emerges in Lacquered chair of Bros called to make visitors dialogue through the sound that radiates from a loudspeaker, in the hybridizations of Elia Cantori and in the assembly of polyurethane waste by Alessandro Gerull, which echoes those of the Indian Subodh Gupta. Here they are at stake the principles of obsolescence and conservation, the resistible attraction to consumption and the questioning of material memory. In Linda Carrara the theme is, instead, that of artifice, in Valentina De ‘Mathà the tradition and in Federica di Pietrantonio the virtual. It makes history in itself, I would say, the frottage of visual poetry by Jacopo Martinotti, which has as its starting point the tombstones of the Monumental Cemetery in Milan and as a text the reworking of poems by Marinetti, Merini, Lucini, Ada Negri and others.

From Pignatelli to Ozzola, from Piangiamore to Ruffo, from Masbedo to Viale, the Cairo Prize was a springboard for all the winners, but also for many participants. Until October 16, all the works of the Prize, together with the winners of the previous editions and with those of the Art Prize, will remain on display for free at Palazzo Reale.