20 years of the Max Mara Artwork Prize for Girls—whose earlier awardees embrace the Turner-Prize winner Helen Cammock—are being celebrated on the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The exhibition Time for Girls!, which opens at the moment (17 April), options the work of the prize’s 9 winners, masking a spread of media from movie and ceramics to woodcuts and display prints on paper.
“Though every artist labored independently, there are widespread threads which unite all of the tasks,” says Sara Piccinni, a senior curator on the Collezione Maramotti, the spectacular personal assortment of Achille Maramotti, who based Max Mara, the womens’ clothes model in 1951. These threads embrace “explorations of historical past and reminiscence, ethics, the lived feminine expertise”, she provides. As an entire, it makes for a strong exhibition.
The prize was developed in 2005 by Iwona Blazwick, then director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Luigi Maramotti, the chief government officer of Max Mara. “The unique proposition was to look once more on the concept of the Grand Tour,” Blazwick tells The Artwork Newspaper, “and to direct consideration again to the humanities and crafts by which Italy is so wealthy”. With London seen as central to the dialog round modern artwork on the time, and the Whitechapel as lengthy supporting girls artists, the gallery was seen as a great accomplice for the initiative. To be elegible artists, who’ve been nominated by an skilled feminine panel, are primarily based within the UK.
Helen Cammock, who went on to co-win the Turner Prize after the Max Mara, on the engraving laboratory of Istituto Centrale per la Grafica of Rome throughout her residency Courtesy Collezione Maramotti. Picture: Sebastiano Luciano
Almost all 9 artists had been current for the exhibition’s opening evening and praised the prize’s construction which gives a six-month totally funded residency in Italy, an exhibition of the ensuing work on the Whitechapel Gallery and the Maramotti Assortment in Reggio Emilia, plus a assured acquisition by the Maramotti Assortment.
Emma Hart, who accomplished her work in 2017, created vividly adorned heads with the ceramics specialists at Faenza, whereas Andrea Buttner (2011) selected to spend time in monastic communities in Assisi and Biella, investigating the correspondence between renunciation of wealth and the Arte Povera motion of the Nineteen Sixties. Emma Talbot (2022) whose work greets guests to the present within the type of a ferocious grey-haired feminine warrior, stated: “To have the time to develop a full venture with the utmost ambition, after which with enormous visibility, was an ideal alternative.” Talbot now lives in Reggio Emilia, the place Max Mara relies. Some have gone on to bag different awards. Cammock (2018) co-won the Turner Prize the next 12 months.
Andrea Büttner, Vogelpredigt (2010)
© Andrea Büttner, by SIAE 2025. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti. Picture: Dario Lasagni
Arturo Galansino, the director of the Palazzo Strozzi since 2015, who is understood for introducing modern artwork to the establishment, tells The Artwork Newspaper: “The historical past of artwork was invented in Florence. So what higher place is there to point out its progress in modern phrases.” Additionally on view in on the Palazzo Strozzi is Tracey Emin’s exhibition Intercourse and Solitude, whereas a brand new work by an rising Italian artist Giulia Cenci goes on present within the venture house on the finish of Could. “Time For Girls!” certainly.
