Fondazione Ermanno Casoli announces the winner of the 22nd edition of the Premio Ermanno Casoli: the important recognition in the field of contemporary art in Italy has been awarded to Agostino Iacurci (Foggia, 1986) who will create a site-specific artwork for the AIRFORCE headquarters in Cerreto D’Esi (AN) – a company belonging to the Elica group.
In the words of Marcello Smarrelli, Artistic Director of Fondazione Ermanno Casoli, “With his own highly personal style, Agostino Iacurci represents reality, and the landscape in particular. In addition to such a highly expressive style, a fundamental element of Iacurci’s practice is his aptitude for relationships, which prompts him to share the creative process with heterogeneous groups of people.”
In his artistic practice, Agostino Iacurci uses painting, sculpture, drawing, light and sound, heterogeneously combining various media to create immersive installations that intimately dialogue with places – visionary spaces in which stories, personal memories, literary references and vernacular tales freely converge. His large-scale pictorial interventions, which have earned him international fame, take the form of large painting interventions – an original reinterpretation of what is known as ‘talking architecture’.
Starting from those considerations, Agostino Iacurci was invited to conceive a project for AIRFORCE’s new plant, which, as is typical of the Premio Ermanno Casoli, stems from a training need identified within the company in collaboration with the Human Resources department. After being acquired by Elica and seeing its headquarters transferred from Fabriano to Cerreto D’Esi, AIRFORCE needed to recreate the cohesion, energy and spirit of sharing that have always characterised it, but also to offer a welcoming and familiar place for its workers.
The intervention will be the result of a series of actions that will start in May and will involve the entire company population – around 100 managers, employees and workers – without any hierarchical distinction, with the aim of transforming a large portion of the plant, which is currently used as a transit area, into a place for employees to rest and meet.