Flash Art Italia Award 2026: Bologna Becomes a Stage for Living Art
There was the buzz of a major film premiere — only instead of movie stars, the entire ecosystem of Italian contemporary art filled the room. The second edition of the Flash Art Italia Award turned Bologna’s Cinema Modernissimo into a lively, noisy auditorium, animated by artists, curators, institutions, cultural practitioners, and the public, all mixed together without hierarchies. A night, in partnership with Food Future Institute, that felt less like an awards ceremony and more like a collective scene: criticism taking physical form, a community recognizing itself, the present narrating itself in real time.
Led by Cristiano Seganfreddo — mind, body, and soul of the project together with Gea Politi of CGPS, the publishing group behind Flash Art — the ceremony opened with a deliberate detour: a Special Prize awarded to Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, honoring thirty years of vision that have quite literally built key parts of the system.
Then came a map of the present. Benni Bosetto received the Artist Award, Marta Papini the Curator Award, MATTA the Art Gallery Award, Centrale Fies the Art and Territory Award, Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio the Project Space Award, Museion the Institution Award, Valentino the Art and Fashion Award, Greta Schödl the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Vincenzo Estremo the Art Writing Award.
More than a list of winners, it read like a radiography of the here and now: radical practices, territories that actively produce culture, institutions willing to take risks, and hybrid spaces that keep the scene alive. In dialogue with Arte Fiera, the evening reaffirmed Bologna as a temporary capital for the system that thinks, produces, and circulates Italian contemporary art.
Sixty years after the founding of Flash Art, the award works less as a podium and more as a lens: it observes, connects, and returns complexity. And for one night, inside a movie theater, Italian contemporary art enjoyed its best close-up.
Text: Germano D’Acquisto
Photos: Alessio Ammannati, Ludovica Arcero
