MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE

MAXXI and Bulgari support young art talent

The exhibition that opens features the artists shortlisted for the 2018 edition:
Talia Chetrit, Invernomuto and Diego Marcon

The 2018 MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE, the museum’s project supporting and promoting young art, is gathering pace and thanks to its important partnership with Bulgari, it has been revised and enriched this year as it opens to the international artistic scene. From 1 June to 28 October 2018, the works from this edition’s shortlisted artists—Talia Chetrit (1982), Invernomuto (Simone Bertuzzi, 1983 and Simone Trabucchi, 1982) and Diego Marcon (1985)—will be shown in an exhibition at MAXXI curated by Giulia Ferracci.

Chosen by an international jury composed of David Elliott, Independent Curator, Yuko Hasegawa, Artistic Director at MOT in Tokyo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director at the Serpentine Galleries in London, Hou Hanru, Artistic Director at MAXXI and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Director of MAXXI Arte, the artists were selected for their “awareness of the historical moment in which we are living and their capacity for expanding the confines of the artistic idiom.” Their works are now featured in an exhibition, from which the jury will choose a winner, who will be announced on 13 October 2018. The exhibition will have an Honour Committee to help promote the prize around the world. The committee members include Giovanna Melandri, President of the Fondazione MAXXI, and Jean Christophe Babin, CEO of the Gruppo Bulgari, as well as the Oscar winning director Giuseppe Tornatore.

Contacts between MAXXI, the first Italian national museum dedicated to contemporary creativity, and Bulgari, for over 130 years an emblem of creativity and excellence, were first established in 2014, on the occasion of the exhibition Bellissima. The Italy of High Fashion 1945-1968, for which the maison was the main partner. With the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE, this partnership –based on shared values such as excellence, innovation, passion, creativity and experimentation and on an awareness of the importance of support for culture and the strategic role of the public-private alliance—is being consolidated.

The exhibition
Housed in the museum’s Gallery 4, the exhibition offers a true “immersion” in the artistic universe of the three shortlisted artists. Foregoing a pre-established layout, the exposition is composed of three areas within which the artists have worked to present, with works conceived for the occasion or through an overview of existing works, the multiple sources of their inspiration.

Chosen for “her ability to reinvent the use of photography, mixing past and present languages in her interpretation of relationships between the body, the gaze and identity,” Talia Chetrit, who lives and works in New York, is presenting a selection of over 20 photographs from her recent artistic output together with images from her personal archive and a video.

Selected for “the research into global social and political issues filtered through an imagery influenced by both pop and sub-cultures which makes their work personal and sincere,” the duo Invernomuto is presenting a new work; a complex installation composed of a film, audio frequencies, a sculpture and a perfume, in a blend of diverse idioms that characterises their artistic research. 

Chosen “for having taken an original and poetic approach to audio-visual experimentation and the use of cinematic genres and for his critical rereading of historical sites” Diego Marcon will be presenting a new work, Ludwig, a video projected on the entire wall that employs the CGI (computer-generated imagery), technology used in computer graphics for the rendering of digital special effects in film, television, advertising, video game simulations and all graphics applications. 

The MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE is an important project that supports and promotes young artists. It represents the continuation and the evolution of the Premio MAXXI which has provided the founding nucleus of the museum’s collection and a served as a launchpad for many young artists (including Yuri Ancarani, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Vanessa Beecroft, Lara Favaretto, Nico Vascellari, Francesco Vezzoli among many others). Thanks to the extraordinary partnership with Bulgari, the prize is today being renewed; it is growing and expanding its horizons with the objective of promoting, not only Italian artists, but also those of different nationalities who have over the last two years produced a new project in Italy within the public or private spheres.