Matteo Viglietta
Award

The Matteo Viglietta Award 2025 has been awarded to Davide Stucchi presented by the gallery Martina Simeti, Milano.

Born in 2022 and promoted by Collezione La Gaia, the award is intended to commemorate Matteo Viglietta, a great and passionate collector who had a particularly strong bond with Artissima since its beginnings.

Their remarks: For its irony, poetry, and ability to open up potentially infinite questions — ones that reflect outward, toward the cosmos, and inward, into the depths of our unconscious — the La Gaia Collection has chosen to award the Italian artist Davide Stucchi for his work Rising, falling, looking for the sun (2025), presented by Martina Simeti Gallery.The piece, created using industrial and everyday materials, embodies the philosophy that has always guided the La Gaia Collection in its relationship with creativity: an art that takes shape within the folds of daily life and manifests itself through any expressive medium. This work is a brief, unwritten story in which each of us can recognize ourselves — as a modern Icarus, or a frustrated Narcissus — and, like life itself, perhaps it returns to us the very image we “make” of it.

The acquisition institutionalizes a practice initiated and consolidated by Viglietta, who each year used to choose a work that had some connection with the materials and tools sold by his company – Viglietta Matteo S.p.A., a leader in the import and wholesale of hardware. The work acquired at Artissima, in addition to becoming part of the Collezione La Gaia, may also be used as the cover of the “catalistino” and, in this sense, will have a connection with one of the hundreds of products or materials contained in it, thus celebrating the ironic and irreverent spirit that always distinguished Viglietta – a man with an open mind and a contagious smile, interested in the discovery and rediscovery of radical practices not always recognized by the market.

Winners of Matteo Viglietta Award’s previous editions: Francesca Cataldi, Gramma_Epsilon gallery, Athens (2024); Igor Grubić, Laveronica gallery, Modica (2023); Vasilis Papageorgiou, UNA gallery, Piacenza (2022).