Artissima has presented a new project, a competition aimed at launching on the International market young Italian artists aged under 35. The project emerges from fifteen years of experience in the field of contemporary art, experience of international rank that has made Artissima become a reference appointment for Italian and foreign galleries that deal in contemporary art.
The last edition, the first directed by Andrea Bellini, had set itself the ambitious objective of being really International and proposing new young talents. The appointment was met with great success by the critics and the public: 43,000 people present, fully booked for conferences and debates, and important purchases realized even for the foreign market.
As every year, the last edition witnessed the renewal of the rite of big purchases of Piedmontese foundations in favour of the region’s cultural institutions. The CRT Foundation bought works by Franz Ackermann and Marijke van Warmerdam for Castello di Rivoli, and Maurizio Mochetti and Gianni Caravaggio for GAM. The newly established FRAC Piemonte Fund got works by Rosa Barba, Keren Cytter, Sam Durant, Jimmie Durham, Vidya Gastaldon, Cyprien Gaillard, Ian Kiaer, Josephine Meckseper, Tom Molloy, Evariste Richer, Ignacio Uriarte.
In this climate of new proposals and great upheaval, the fifteenth edition of the fair will be held from 7th to 9th November 2008, but even the first edition of the Italian Wave competition will take place, a competition dedicated to young Italian artists with the purpose of promoting emerging talents who are not represented yet by a gallery. By doing this, Artissima aims at confirming itself as an instrument at the service of the Italian art system.
The competition, which has just been opened (applications can be presented from 26th May to 23rd August) will explore and highlight the effervescent and always productive panorama that characterizes academies, schools and centres of art production. Artists, selected by a committee of four curators, will have the chance to show their oeuvre to the public of Artissima, without any intermediations.
The competition is open to young Italian artists under the age of 35 who are not represented by any gallery, neither in Italy nor abroad. The project will start on 26th May; candidates are required to provide a description of their art project complete with digital images or videos of the works presented. The Committee will choose a maximum of 8 winners out of the participants and 4 of them will be offered the further possibility to attend a postgraduate course of high artistic formation.
The final stage of the competition will be the exhibition at Artissima 2008 of the works selected: the artists will thus be presented to a large public of experts, directors and museum curators, collectors, critics and journalists.
The artists will be evaluated by an international Selection Committee, coordinated by Andrea Bellini, who will choose the winners.
The members of the Committee are: Sebastian Cichocki – sociologist, art critic and curator (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw); Gail Cochrane – director of the Spinola Banna Art Foundation (Turin); Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy – curator (Kadist Art Foundation, Paris); Alessandro Rabottini – art critic and curator (Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, Bergamo).
In the wake of international fairs, even this important Italian fair of contemporary art seems to have realized how important it is to give our young artists the chance to grow, by giving them visibility aimed at becoming international. Indeed, this is certainly also the way to keep collectors interested in the Italian art panorama, rich in young talents who struggle to emerge and mature to their maximum grade of artistic expression, put down by the impossibility to confront the dimensions of the global market.