Is there anything more precious for an overwhelmed modern woman than time for herself? Chances are she is working outside the home as well as caring for children, aging relatives, a mate or all the above, and struggling to prioritize selfcare. This is the life-changing gift that the Max Mara Art Prize for Women bestows upon its winners: the time to imagine, dream and create.
Time for Women! Empowering Visions in 20 Years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, Strozzina, 2025. Exhibition views. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze.
Time for Women! Empowering Visions in 20 Years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, Strozzina, 2025. Exhibition views. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze.
Time for Women! Empowering Visions in 20 Years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, Strozzina, 2025. Exhibition views. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze.
Time for Women! Empowering Visions in 20 Years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, Strozzina, 2025. Exhibition views. Photo Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio. Courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze.
Organized by the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the biannual award is given to emergent female-identifying artists based in the UK, selected by an all-woman jury of art experts. “The heart of the prize is a six-month residency in Italy tailored to the artistic and personal needs of each winner,” says Collezione Maramotti director, Sara Piccinini. “They spend this time meeting people, discovering places, experimenting with materials and techniques, consulting archives, and visiting museums and workshops.”
To mark the prize’s 20th anniversary, the resulting projects by the nine winners are on display together for the first time in Time for Women!, a show at the Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi’s underground exhibition space, until August 31, 2025. “Each artist followed her own path,” explains Piccinini. “If there are affinities or cross-references, they happen in interesting, unpredictable ways, and we give visitors the pleasure of discovering them.”
While the range of subjects, mediums and perspectives is wide, they do have one thing in common: a dialogue with the context of Italy. “These nine extraordinary artists offer us intriguing, complex, engaging works that propose new and varied visions of our country,” says Piccinini. “They allow us to discover and rediscover unique capacities and features that we don’t always see.”
Highlights for this writer are the pieces more overtly tied to female empowerment. Margaret Salmon’s critique of idealized motherhood in her Neorealist-style video triptych Ninna Nanna is a refreshing antidote to the stereotypical martyr-like image of the Italian mamma. Helen Cammock’s visual and oral collage Che si può fare merits the time to let her meditations on hidden female voices slowly wash over you. Emma Talbot’s installation The Age, a brilliant reimagining of a Klimt painting in Rome, in which a shame-laden crone is transformed into a heroine, offers a hopeful, ecofeminist response to current crises. Finally, Laure Prouvost’s luscious video Swallow is a joyous reclaiming of the kind of pure sensual pleasures in which Italy abounds.
Some might argue that women-only awards only ghettoize women further, rather than bringing them into the mainstream. Yet winning this prize has clearly catapulted the careers of its winners. Four have gone on to exhibit at the “Olympics of the art world”, the Venice Biennale. Two have won the Turner Prize, Britain’s highest art honor, and a third was a nominee. All have shown internationally.
It’s no surprise that Max Mara is the name behind the prize. The clothing brand has been linking fashion, women and art ever since founder Achille Maramotti pioneered Italian prêt-à-porter women’s wear in the 1950s, while also building his collection of contemporary art, now housed in the eponymous Reggio Emilia museum. He also introduced a now iconic men’s coat for women and Italy’s first plus-size designer brand Marina Rinaldi, named after his great-grandmother who, remarkably, had her own dress shop in the 1850s.
One imagines this trailblazing nonna would be proud of where her progeny ended up. In 2005, her great-great-grandson Luigi developed the art prize with Iwona Blazwick, then director of Whitechapel Gallery and prominent champion of women artists. The prize was launched in the British pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennale, the first curated by two women.
Partly thanks to initiatives like this, things have improved for women in the art world since then. In 2019, the Venice Biennale finally achieved gender parity, with 53 per cent women artists; nearly half of US museums are now run by women; and auction turnover for female artists has been growing steadily. However, only four women rank among the top 50 highest grossing artists, 96 per cent of artworks sold at auction are by males, and at the current rate we will not be seeing gender parity in the art market until 2053. Shows like the one at the Strozzina, which complements the show upstairs by Tracey Emin and opening on the heels of the Helen Frankenthaler exhibit, remain as vital as ever. “Time for Women! is a perfect title not just for the show, but for everything happening at Palazzo Strozzi lately,” says the museum’s director Arturo Galansino. “This prize has been a forerunner in the process to make the art world more equal for women. Paying attention to female creativity needs to be the rule, not the exception.”
