Dominique White is latest Max Mara Art prize winner

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Mar 28, 2023

Italian luxury label Max Mara has announced Dominique White as the winer of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, an initiative in collaboration with London’s Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti (the private collection of contemporary art of the fashion label’s founder, Achille Maramotti).

The prize was set up to support and nurture women-identifying artists at a crucial stage in their career and will see White benefiting from a six-month bespoke residency in Italy, to “inform and develop her winning proposal”. It will culminate in a major solo exhibition to be held next year at Whitechapel Gallery and in Italy.

The prize also reflects the increasing links between fashion companies and artists and the positive halo effect that art links have on brands. Max Mara has been forging those links for many year and this is actually the ninth edition of the prize. It’s actually the only visual art prize of its kind in the UK and has been awarded biennially since 2005,. 

White was selected from a shortlist including Rebecca Bellantoni, Bhajan Hunjan, Onyeka Igwe and Zinzi Minott, by a panel of art-world experts. 

She lives and works between Marseille and Essex and is a sculptor and installation artist, “interested in creating new worlds for ‘Blackness’ and fascinated by the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea”.

Max Mara said she “produces ghostly, seemingly fragile, yet highly physical works, often employing discarded and potent nautical relics such as old sails, masts, burned mahogany, chains and rope, and materials such as Kaolin clay and untreated iron”.