The Michetti Prize, one of the longest-running and most prestigious contemporary art awards in Italy, returns on Saturday 8 July 2023. Now in its 74th edition, the Prize presents the works of ten established Italian artists, selected by the curator Costantino D'Orazio, and five students of the Aquila Academy of Fine Arts, included in the Michetti Giovani Prize, which returns after many years of absence.

The title chosen for this edition – “Freedom to have three contrasting ideas” – takes its cue from a text by Mario Merz (1925-2003), a pioneer of research which, starting in the 1950s, has left an indelible mark on the history of Italian and international art. A dialectical attitude, that of Merz, always in search of confrontation, as required by this historical moment, in which artists are ready to assume that attitude of dialogue between languages and imaginaries that Francesco Paolo Michetti had already inaugurated inside the Last Supper Michettiano, founded in Francavilla al Mare around the Convent of Santa Maria del Gesù, with the participation of intellectuals of the caliber of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Michetti, D'Annunzio, Merz...they are the "tutelary gods" of this edition of the Prize, which will enliven an entire cultural season.

The exhibition, which will last longer than the last editions and will close on October 1st, explores all the languages of the contemporary, from installation to painting, from video to mural, up to performance, in a path of site-specific works, which artists have created and reworked for the occasion. “This is not a generational selection – declares D'Orazio – rather a choice of artists with a solid institutional career, who made their debut in the 90s, reacting with their work to the inebriation of the previous decade. In over thirty years of activity, these artists have been able to overcome the research of the great masters of the seventies and eighties, moving freely between different expressions and techniques, while maintaining a profound coherence, rooted in a gaze that comes to question the our certainties. Impossible, and perhaps even useless, to look for a common thread that links their works: they are provocative and express conflicting ideas, like the art and society of our time."