Milan, 18 November 2014 – Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo are the winners of the tenth Furla Art Award, titled The Nude Prize.The announcement was made during a press conference held this morning in the Sala delle Otto Colonne at Palazzo Reale to present this year’s edition of the prize. Domenico Piraina, Director of Palazzo Reale, opened the conference, and speakers included Filippo Del Corno, Councillor for Culture of the City of Milan, Giovanna Furlanetto, President of Fondazione Furla, Chiara Bertola, Curator of the Premio Furla, Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, curator and member of the Premio Furla Advisory Board, and Vanessa Beecroft, guiding artist for the tenth edition of the award.

The international jury, made up of Vanessa Beecroft as Chair, Teresa Gleadowe (Chair, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham), Barbara Hernandez (Director, SOMA, Mexico City), Alya Sebti (Artistic Director, 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech) and Benno Tempel (Director, Foundation Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague) explained their decision as follows:
The jury thought hard about the opportunities that the Premio Furla offers, between the SOMA residency in Mexico and the exhibition in March at Milan’s Palazzo Reale, as well as a grant to make new work.
We thought about the artists who would have the potential to benefit from these opportunities and who could best respond to the contexts provided by the prize.
The winners’ work connects history to current issues which are relevant in Europe and worldwide. It explores the questions of migration (immigration/emigration), the museum archive, memory, and the cultural construction of these themes in ways that counterbalance how they are depicted in society and the mass media, introducing new perspectives.
The jury is pleased to award the Premio Furla to Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo.

Simone Frangi is the Italian curator who, working jointly with Virginie Bobin, selected the artists Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo to be shortlisted for the 2015 Furla Art Award.

– The winners of the award get the chance to create the proposed work, which will be fully underwritten by Fondazione Furla.
– Along with the winners of the nine previous editions, the artists will take part in the retrospective dedicated to the Premio Furla that will be held in Palazzo Reale from 5 March to 12 April 2015.
– The winners and their work will be presented to the public during the next edition of miart, the International Fair of Contemporary Art to be held in Milan from 9 to 12 April 2015.
– The finished work will be previewed in Venice at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in May 2015, during the 56th Venice Biennale.
– Moreover, as in previous years, the winners of the award will have the opportunity to study and work abroad as part of a three- month artist residency, this time to be held at SOMA in Mexico City. The residency will be organized by Viafarini, the documentation center for contemporary art that has overseen the Premio Furla archive since the fifth edition of the award, and provides hospitality for its foreign curators through the VIR (Viafarini-in-residence) residency program in Milan.

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