The President of the Pino Pascali Foundation Stefano Zorzi is pleased to announce the Pino Pascali Prize 2022 – XXIV edition to Nico Vascellari (Vittorio Veneto, TV, 1976). The artist's solo exhibition opens on 9 December 2022 at 6 pm and continues until 9 April 2023.

The Pascali Prize Commission, chaired by Rosalba Branà, former director of the Foundation, and by the curators Roberto Lacarbonara and Pier Paolo Pancotto, motivated the choice as follows:

“Nature, analyzed and reworked in its visual and semantic connotations, constitutes one of the privileged subjects of Nico Vascellari's investigation. The artist has always dealt with this theme by articulating his research into different solutions – both from a methodological and iconographic point of view – and focusing his attention on the sometimes destructive and impetuous action of natural events. The ancestral phenomena of the man-environment and man-animal relationship become in Vascellari thematic cores to redefine the anthropological rituals of popular folklore and underground cultural movements through shamanic approaches".

This edition proposes an unpublished installation intervention entitled Tre, Quattro Galline (hence the title of the exhibition), entirely produced and acquired by the Pino Pascali Foundation. The project is the winner of the "PAC2021 - Plan for Contemporary Art" promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.

The event takes place in parallel at Exchiesetta, an iconic space in the city center of Polignano a Mare which hosted the first editions of the Pino Pascali Prize in the years from 1969 to 1979, where a work from the exhibition will be on display for the entire day.

Nico Vascellari (Vittorio Veneto, TV, 1976) lives and works in Rome. From the outset his research has been oriented towards the language of performance and the production of installation interventions, sculptures, drawings, collages and videos as well as the exploration of sound. Nature, folklore, the underground scene project the artist towards a research governed by actions that allude to tribal rituals, the archaic world and the borderline between individual expression and collective consciousness.