Damon Zucconi is the winner of the 2022 OGR Award. For the first time, an NFT enters the CRT collection

Winner of the fourth edition of theOGR Award sponsored by Artissima and the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT is Damon Zucconi (Bethpage, New York, 1985) of Florence-based VEDA Gallery. He was selected from five artists, chosen by an international committee during the last edition of Artissima, who were each awarded a production grant to create adigital work to be recorded on blockchain via NFT. Each artist was given a budget of 8,000 euros to produce the work. The five artists (Darren Bader, Claudia Comte, Matteo Nasini, Sarah Ortmeyer, Damon Zucconi) thus submitted five NFT works on a dedicated digital platform curated by Artshell. On the occasion of this edition, the OGR Award dialogued with the Surfing NFT project, the project debut of the Beyond Production platform that sees Artissima and Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT initiate an annual reflection on the most innovative trends in contemporary art. In fact, this is the first time the collection of the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT has opened up to NFT.

The winning NFT work, entitled Counting Frame, will be acquired by the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT and will become part of its collection. The prize was awarded by an international jury composed of Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev, director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli, Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of Acute Art in London, Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of Serpentine Galleries in London, Senior Advisor of LUMA in Arles and Senior Artistic Advisor of The Shed in New York, and Samuele Piazza, senior curator of OGR Torino.

"The jury unanimously awards Damon Zucconi, represented by VEDA Gallery in Florence, for how his NFT evokes the history of computation through the abacus, a physical object transformed into something immaterial that calls to mind our world composed of bits and codes,“ this is the motivation. ”There is something surreal about the way this work brings together early abacuses, which the viewer sees with his or her own eyes, and the digital ability to calculate infinitely large numbers, thus emphasizing the different ways in which we attach value to numbers. In Counting Frame, Zucconi uses the abacus as a way to anchor contemporary possibilities of vision, production, and distribution to ancient techniques and tools. The abacus becomes hypnotic, bewitching, capturing our attention in an endless loop."

The jury also awarded a special honorable mention to Matteo Nasini of Milan’s Clima gallery: “The artist is a master of a sophisticated digital practice that, through rendering, transforms a small image into something that allows us to experience the universe, making Nasini a ’builder of worlds.’”

"Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT opens to NFT. I am pleased to congratulate Damon Zucconi, winner of the fourth edition of the OGR Awards: his Counting Frame made through Non Fungible Token and blockchain technology, now becomes part of our historic collection and will be made available to OGR," comments Anna Ferrino, president of Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. "A prestigious award that, in addition to reinforcing the strong synergy that binds Fondazione Arte CRT to Artissima and the OGR, represents the latest stage of a challenge that began last fall at the Turin fair, when Ilaria Bonacossa proposed us to support the conceptual platform Beyond production. This, declined in Surfing NFT, gave rise to a cutting-edge project consistent with the mission of Fondazione Arte CRT, which has always been at the forefront of the exploration of new experimental creative frontiers."

Image: Damon Zucconi, Counting Frame, detail (2022). Courtesy of the artist and VEDA Gallery, Florence

Damon Zucconi is the winner of the 2022 OGR Award. For the first time, an NFT enters the CRT collection

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