Time for Women! Unfolds Two Decades of Female Artistic Exploration at Palazzo Strozzi
April 24, 2025 – “Time for Women!” Exhibition celebrates 20 years of Max Mara Art Prize for Women
At Palazzo Strozzi, a room opens to history—made, held, and still in motion. From 17 April to 31 August 2025, the Strozzina hosts Time for Women! Empowering Visions in 20 Years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, a retrospective spanning two decades of female-led visual practice. The exhibition gathers the works of nine UK-based artists, past winners of the biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women, established in 2005 in partnership with Whitechapel Gallery and joined by Collezione Maramotti in 2007.
Through sculpture, ceramics, performance, text, video, and sound, the show documents a rare kind of space. The prize provides a six-month Italian residency to an emerging female-identifying artist living and working in the UK. The goal: not just exposure, but immersion. No deadlines, no deliverables—just research, slow observation, and the possibility of new work. The resulting pieces debut at Whitechapel Gallery in London and at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia.
This year, Time for Women! folds those outcomes into one tactile journey. On view: Helen Cammock’s lyrical video work. Emma Hart’s screaming ceramics. Margaret Salmon’s 16mm lullabies. The exhibition is curated by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Collezione Maramotti, forming a narrative not of accomplishment, but of process.
The Architecture of Care
What makes this prize different is the pacing; artists are chosen before the work exists. They arrive in Italy with no pressure to produce. Instead: freedom to reflect, wander, read, record, and test.
That space becomes form. Margaret Salmon’s Ninna Nanna (2005), a triptych filmed in Florence, captures three mothers singing a traditional Tuscan lullaby. Their gestures are not staged. They fold laundry. Hold their children. Time passes in full view.
This is what the exhibition preserves: a structure of care that artists have translated into form. Emma Talbot’s hand-drawn textiles. Dominique White’s ghostly sculptures. These pieces build out from a deep logic: that women working slowly, intentionally, and without interruption will change the frame itself.
The works shown don’t just reflect personal narratives. They revise collective ones. Helen Cammock—winner in 2018—uses video, print, and sound to dismantle linear histories. In The Long Note, she interweaves female resistance movements with personal memory, music, and silence.
Andrea Büttner questions systems of value. Laure Prouvost creates fictions that feel like language dreams. Corin Sworn pulls from commedia dell’arte and archival material.
What connects them is not style or theme, but intent. A refusal to produce on command. A commitment to inquiry over resolution. And a shared sense that Italy—as site, as symbol, as material—holds something unfinished.
Time for Women! Retrospective of Two Decades of Max Mara Art Prize for Women
📍 Venue: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
📆 Dates: 17 April – 31 August 2025
🕙 Hours: Daily 10 a.m.–8 p.m., Thursdays until 11 p.m.
🎟️ Tickets: Palazzo Strozzi
🎨 Organized by: Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi & Collezione Maramotti
👩🎨 Artists: Margaret Salmon, Hannah Rickards, Andrea Büttner, Laure Prouvost, Corin Sworn, Emma Hart, Helen Cammock, Emma Talbot, Dominique White
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