2020 Arte Laguna Prize Announce Winners

On July 21, the Cultural Association of the Modern Contemporary Art Association Venice (MoCA) announced the four winners of its annual Arte Laguna Prize, comprised of a cash award of EUR 10,000 (USD 11,600) for each winning artist. 

Beijing-based artist Gao Yuan was awarded for her six-minute animated short film Cloud of the Unknown (2019) for the category of video art, virtual art, digital graphics, and performance sections. The video showed scenes based on the artist’s brightly colored paintings of illusionary landscapes, foraying into the interstices of dream and reality, and portraying the difficulties of being an artist. In the sculpture and installation, land art, and urban art sections, Israeli multidisciplinary artist Moshe Vollach was recognized for the outdoor installation 31 cubes (2016), comprised of identically-sized ice cubes placed linearly in the Negev Desert. The work highlights the contrast between matter and space, and also references environmental issues such as global warming and desertification. 

Among the other winning works are Spanish multimedia artist Belén Mazuecos’s acrylic painting Fragile artist: Handle with care II (2017), which tackles the legitimacy of art, and Slovenian designer Primož Jeza’s adaptable working table Frankenstein’s Bride (2013). The two works respectively won in the categories of painting and photography sections, and art design section.

The jury for the 14th edition of the Arte Laguna Prize, led by curator and art critic Igor Zanti, include Erin Dziedzic, chief curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City; Zhao Li, professor of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts; Riccardo Passoni, director of the Modern Art Gallery in Turin; Vasili Tsereteli, director of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery; Valentino Catricalà, curator and director of the Maker Faire; Karel Boonzaaijer, architect and academic; and designer Aldo Cibic. Winners were selected from 120 finalists, who were shortlisted from a pool of over 10,000 entries. 

Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 finalist exhibition has been postponed to March 2021 at the Arsenale Nord in Venice, to be shown along with works from the 2021 finalists. In addition, this year’s winning works will also be exhibited at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2021 alongside over 60 winning works from all previous editions of the prize.

Fion Tse is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

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