Nona Inescu won the third edition of the Ducato Prize with the work "Echo".

Nona Inescu (Bucharest, 1991) won the third edition of the Ducato Prize with the work "Echo", realized with the collaboration of the artist Vlad Nanca. The prize consists in 10.000 euros and the acquisition of the work by the cultural association Coil, founded by Michele Cristella, collector and member of the Collective.

DucatoPrize: the name refers to the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, i.e. to the territory of the founder based in Fiorenzuola, but it is the only reference to parochialism of a prize with an aim towards international contemporary art and a high rate of experimentation. The winner is a young Romanian artist who makes research her distinctive feature.

Inescu prevailed in an all-female short list which also included Valentina Furian (Venice, 1989) with a video entitled "PRESENTE" and June Crespo (Pamplona, 1982) with the sculpture "instrumentos y fetiches".

The exhibition of the finalists' works, the award ceremony and the Gala dinner took place in Spazio Volumnia, a spectacular deconsecrated church with a romantic past in the center of Piacenza, which Enrica de Micheli transformed a few years ago into a multidisciplinary and therefore purely contemporary space: art and design gallery but also bistro, a place devoted to hosting cultural events and soon a bookstore.

The prize, structured as an open call, has attracted almost 300 applications from artists from all over the world; one of the distinctive features of the prize as well as one of its key assets was that in this edition, in addition to the traditional jury of very experienced professionals: curators and gallery owners (Marta Papini, Chris Sharp, Zoe de Luca, Leonardo Bigazzi and Paolo Zani) a jury composed of 11 collectors, many of whom are Collective members, thus creating a comparison between different but equally qualified points of view.

Collectors, in the true sense of the meaning of the word: Emilio Alvarez, Emilio Bordoli, Mauro De Iorio, Frédéric De Goldschmidt, Erminia Di Biase, Andrea Fustinoni, Vittorio Gaddi, Marina Nissim, Cinzia Sanvido, Veronica Siciliani Fendi and Marco Zappalorto.

Heterogeneous in taste and age but united by a genuine passion for art and research, in short, no chasers of followers but rather of talent. The collectors assigned a special mention to Olivia Erlanger (New York, 1990), a young Los Angeles-based artist present at the DucatoPrize with the work "Roseville".

Finally, the DucatoPrize also reserved a space for the most promising young artists still involved in the art academies, and the winner of cash prize (1000 euro) Accademia Prize was Carla Giaccio Darias with an evocative sculpture with organic forms, prevailing over the other nominees Federico Arani and Carlos Casuso who received appreciations for his figurative painting.

See you in 2022 for the fourth edition of the DucatoPrize, wishing a bright future like that of the artists.