Guglielmo Maggini | Winner of The Talent Prize 2025

z2o Sara Zanin is pleased to announce that Guglielmo Maggini is the winner of The Talent Prize 2025.

 

The eighteenth edition of the competition promoted by Inside Art once again confirms its role as a talent incubator and privileged observatory of emerging trends in contemporary art in Italy.

The selection was entrusted to a jury composed of museum directors, curators, and leading critics, figures who contribute each year to mapping the national art scene, recognizing the plurality of languages, research, and sensibilities that animate the new generations of artists: Maria Emanuela Bruni (President of the MAXXI Foundation, Rome), Costantino d'Orazio (Director of the National Museums of Umbria), Teresa Emanuele (art project manager and photographer), Gianluca Marziani (curator and critic), Anna Mattirolo (art historian and curator), Renata Cristina Mazzantini (Director of GNAMC, Rome), Peter Benson Miller (art historian and curator), Chiara Parisi (Director of Centre Pompidou, Metz), Federica Pirani (Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Heritage), Ludovico Pratesi (curator and founder of Spazio Taverna), Marcello Smarrelli (Artistic Director of Pesaro Musei), Guido Talarico (publisher and director of Inside Art), Roberta Tenconi (curator at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan) and Adriana Polveroni (artistic director of Roma Arte in Nuvola).

As usual, the winner, finalists, and special prize winners will participate in the Talent Prize collective exhibition, which will open again this year in December at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.

 

The first prize was awarded to Guglielmo Maggini for Titano Mio, a sculpture that blends the craftsmanship of ceramics with contemporary plastic research with rare consistency. As the official statement emphasizes: "The jury awarded Guglielmo Maggini for his ability to combine technical expertise with the craftsmanship of ceramics in the creation of Titano Mio, a sculpture made using molds from the Fumanti family archive. The work demonstrates how tradition can be reinterpreted in a contemporary key, activating a profound dialogue with the genius loci and offering an original and contemporary reading of a material as ancient as it is alive."

The work is presented as a sculptural conglomerate of ceramic and resin which, in its overall form, recalls at once a tree, a totem of toys, and an explosion of vital fragments. Created during a residency at the Fumanti artisan workshop in Gubbio, as part of the city's 27th Biennial of Contemporary Art curated by Spazio Taverna, the work stems from an investigation into the archive molds that belonged to the company's founder, Aldo Fumanti. These molds, once production tools and then discarded by subsequent generations, become for Maggini an expressive alphabet to be brought back to the present, a grammar of memory that translates into new forms.

The sculptural group thus activates an intense dialogue between solids and voids, between fathers and crafts, between a tradition imprisoned in plaster and its rebirth in a new material. Ceramic, an organic and historical matrix, intertwines with resin, a medium born of the contemporary era, which in this context acts as a symbolic and physical glue. The result is a ceaseless game of metamorphosis, in which ornamental and naturalistic motifs chase each other, giving rise to a poetic reflection on the relationship between man and nature, between historical memory and personal vision.