Announcement: Renaissance Arts Prize 2010 – The Heroism of Vision

by Editorial team | Mar 25, 2010 in illywords news | Leave A Comment

Created by Sharpcut Visual Arts Project and held annually at the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the Renaissance Arts Prize is a photography and video art award open to artists of all nationalities based in Italy and the United Kingdom, and under 35 years of age. illywords is pleased to announce this prize as, along with illy,  support young artists both through prizes (such as the illy art prize and illy sustainart) and through communication with the objective to give them worldwide visibility.

The first two years of the Renaissance Arts Prize were dedicated to the Italian Renaissance and to the Futurist movement respectively. The last edition, Back to the Futurism: Art is a cerebral secretion capable of exact calibration?, was supported by Tate Modern, and was reviewed by Artforum, Artinfo, ArtKey, Exibart, Evening Standard and many other Italian and international publications and websites.

The Renaissance Arts Prize 2010 draws inspiration from a chapter of Susan Sontag’s famous essay On Photography and from the life of Italian artist Mario Giacomelli, a photographer whose most famous series were a visual response to the work of poets such as Giacomo Leopardi, Eugenio Montale, Edgar Lee Masters, and Emily Dickinson. Participants are invited to submit work in response to the theme and to selected quotes by John Szarkowski, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes proposed in the regulations.

Twelve artists will be selected by the jury – six in the photography section and six in the video art section – and then submitted to a larger voting committee composed of representatives of the sponsors, curators, dealers, critics and journalists, who will select two winners in each category: the best Italian artist and the best non-Italian artist. The twelve short-listed candidates will be invited to an awards ceremony and presentation of the selected work at the Italian Cultural Institute in London on 9 July 2010.

In addition to the four official awards, the participants will be proposed for the residency Atelier D’Artista, organized yearly by cultural association Toscana In, and a number of special prizes courtesy of the sponsors, such as the set of cups illy art collection “Stati d’animo” designed by Mario Giacomelli in 1997 (see photo). Further information and images of last year’s short-listed projects can be found on www.sharpcut.eu.

Competition regulations can be downloaded from the “News and Events” section of the website, or requested by sending an email to renaissanceartsprize@sharpcut.eu.

The deadline for applications is 10th May 2010.

Jury

• Alessandra Masolini, Director, Renaissance Arts Prize
• Alessio Antoniolli, Director, Triangle Trust & Gasworks
• Andrew Brown, Senior Strategy Officer for Visual Arts, Arts Council England
• Shoko Maeda, artist, winner of the 2009 Renaissance photography awards

Committee

A full list of the voting committee members, including representatives of the sponsors and the patrons, will be released two weeks before the awards ceremony.