Giulia Cenci wins the XXI edition of the Cairo Prize

Giulia Cenci (Cortona, 1988) is the winner of the 21st edition of the Cairo Prize, the traditional award that Cairo Editore gives each year to an Italian artist under 40 years of age. The young Tuscan artist won the prize that valorizes young Italian art with her work Untitled.

Born in Cortona in 1988, Giulia Cenci trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and the St. Joost Academy in Breda, Netherlands. A finalist for the MAXXI Bulgari Prize 2020, major milestones include the exhibitions Tallone di ferro at Museo Novecento (Florence, 2021), Futuruins at Palazzo Fortuny (Venice, 2019) and participation in 2022 in the 59th Venice Art Biennale.

The protagonists of Giulia Cenci’s works are hybridizations of man, animal and machinery. In the case of the work created for the Cairo Prize, Untitled, a wolf (the cast of a taxidermist’s silhouette) is immersed in a whirlpool: its lying posture may recall that of a man enjoying refreshment, but also that of a lifeless or dead animal. The tub is open to allow a glimpse of its inner components, as if it too were an organism or as if it were part of a single body along with the wolf. With her usual use of salvaged materials associated with the cast technique, the artist thus carries forward her reflection on “organic body and artificial body,” as she explains.

“I am keen to explore the relationship with the machines we have created: they are our extensions, but at the same time we are subservient to them,” Giulia Cenci emphasizes. Often organized in complex installations and extended to an entire room, in this case in the form of a single sculptural/installation element, “the artist’s works,” explains critic Stefano Castelli, “court the macabre and the paradoxical by prompting the viewer to question what they are seeing. The initial revulsion also leads to a mirroring in the work by the viewer, to questions about contemporary technological drift, the idea of underlying and explicit violence, but also about the resilience of the individual in a complex and in many ways hostile world.”

This is the motivation of the jury, composed of Gabriella Belli, Luca Massimo Barbero, Ilaria Bonacossa, Lorenzo Giusti, Andrea Viliani and Emilio Isgrò: "Whenthe human condition is disrupted by a hostile and disturbing present, artists know how to become lucid interpreters of reality. For being able to represent with formal power the encounter between living beings and technological mutations, between natural and artificial, between identity and otherness, the jury unanimously awards the 21st Cairo Prize to Giulia Cenci’s work Untitled." Her work won the prize of 25,000 euros.

Giulia Cenci prevailed over nineteen other contestants: Thomas Braida, Bros, Elia Cantori, Linda Carrara, Valentina De’ Mathà, Luca Di Luzio, Federica Di Pietrantonio, Alice Faloretti, Bruno Fantelli, Andrea Fontanari, Gaia Fugazza, Alessandro Gerull, Corinna Gosmaro, Cecilia Granara, Giulio Malinverni, Jacopo Martinotti, Adinda-Putri Palma, Diego Scroppo, and Marta Spagnoli.

Giulia Cenci wins the XXI edition of the Cairo Prize

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