The G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize promotes and financially supports contemporary artists, with the ultimate goal of highlighting excellence in the arts.
Our deep love for art, combined with the desire to support and promote the advancement of artistic creativity, led to the establishment of the annual G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize in 2019, a culmination of the Foundation’s thirty-year long effort to strengthen and promote leadership and innovation in the visual arts.
The Art Prize supports contemporary artists by offering them the opportunity to create a new, site-specific artwork which will remain on permanent display in Agios Nikolaos, Crete, will become part of the Foundation’s art collection, and will join an important cultural heritage as well.
In 2023, in its third year, the Art Prize introduced two important changes: firstly, it welcomed applications from international artists, and secondly, instead of one, the Selection Committee awarded three equal prizes to the three proposals which stood out.
Similar to last years’ prize, the 2024 Art Prize is open to Greek and international artists. Three proposals will be selected and awarded equally for their originality, creativity, site-specificity, and connection with the theme of Care, which is the main topic of the Research Residency Programmes organised by the Foundation as well as of the ongoing Care Ecologies project, partly funded by Creative Europe.
The Art Prize calls for site specific artworks created to be part of a configured environment; works which narrate an internal path/route, and which can be reference points/landmarks within their exhibition space. The selected works are presented to the public in the summer of 2024, after which they will remain on permanent display in Agios Nikolaos, Crete, and become part of the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation’s art collection, which comprises more than 70 artworks by renowned Greek and international artists.
Applications for the 2024 Art Prize are now closed.
ART PRIZE SELECTION COMMITTEE
Sotirios Bahtsetzis – Artistic Director, G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, Art Historian, Associate Professor at the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly
George Gyparakis – Visual Artist, Professor at the Department of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens
Polina Kosmadaki – Art Historian, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Benaki Museum
Nikos Navridis – Visual Artist, Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts
Alexandros Psychoulis – Visual Artist, Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly
Ami Yamasaki’s installation, Whispers travel and whisper to you again, made entirely of paper, is a sculptural symphony of whispers that weaves together experiences and sounds from Japan and Crete.
In Day, Alexandros Laios captures the different hours of the day using theatre filters, in a colourful rendering of the melancholic contemplation of the fleeting moment.
Maro Fasoulis’ Nomadic Murals redefines traditional practices and narratives. Juxtaposing thread, wood, and parts of textiles from the last century, the artist proposes a contemporary composition of woven ensembles, spread across a fifty-meter-long corridor.
The G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize 2022 was jointly awarded to artists Ileana Arnaoutou (1994) and Ismene King (1993) for their in situ sculptural installation Tender shell geophilia. The artwork was added to the Foundation’s art collection in 2022
«Come with the Wind» was the recipient of the 1st G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation Art Prize in 2019
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