The award, launched in 2009 in collaboration with Fondazione Ettore Fico to promote the work of emerging artists, has a value of 5,000 € and is assigned to one artist chosen from all of those participating in Artissima.
The jury, composed of Letizia Ragaglia (director, Museion, Bolzano), Andrea Viliani (director, MADRE, Napoli), Andrea Busto (director, MEF – Museo Ettore Fico, Torino) and Renato Alpegiani (collector), has awarded Tosatti for the following reasons:
“Interpreting art as a radically public experience. Accommodating the complexity of art in its cognitive potentialities – rather than rejecting or simplifying it – in order to speak of our contemporaneity. Expressing the facets of an experience of art in which past, present and future, intimate and communal dimensions, utopias and conflicts, rootedness and displacement, all dialogue among with each other.
The works and the projects of Gian Maria Tosatti (b. Roma, 1980) – in articulating among in the fields of the visual arts, architecture and performance;, in their approach based on rigorous approach to documentary and field research;, in their relationg between the dimensions of the process and that of the final realisation –, the works and the projects of Gian Maria Tosatti (Roma, 1980) are diaries, memoirs, long-term explorations, often structured into actual cycles, of concepts of identity and community, of History history as ‘“stories’”.
Interwoven within these, in a dynamic and fragmented synthesis, are literary, philosophical, sociological and anthropological elements that bring an inevitably political sense as well as a necessarily complex function to the experience of what can be understood, today, as ‘”public art’”.
In an ideal continuation of the assistance and support that the Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize has provided in recent years — and intends to provide in the future — even to the latest youngest generations of Italian artists, identifying and supportingassisting, in the dialogue between national and international artistic research, emerging artists who are already noted for their profile of research and experimentation, this year, the Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize is awarded to Gian Maria Tosatti.””
Fondazione Ettore Fico Prize jury
Letizia Ragaglia, director, Museion, Bolzano
Andrea Viliani, director, MADRE, Napoli
Andrea Busto, director, MEF – Museo Ettore Fico, Torino
Renato Alpegiani, collector
