Meet the Woman Who Scooped Up the Max Mara Art Prize in Venice

Indonesian artist Dian Suci is the winner of the 10th edition of the award supporting emerging and midcareer women.​Indonesian artist Dian Suci is the winner of the 10th edition of the award supporting emerging and midcareer women. 

MILAN — Indonesian talent Dian Suci scooped up the 10th edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women.

The winner was announced in a ceremony held in Venice on Thursday evening, timed with the opening of the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, at the presence of Cecilia Alemani, the prize’s curator and chair of the jury; Elia Maramotti, representative of the family that founded Max Mara and Collezione Maramotti; Sara Piccinini, director of Collezione Maramotti, and Venus Lau, director of Museum MACAN.

Established in 2005 by Max Mara, the biennial prize supports and promotes emerging or midcareer artists at a crucial stage in their professional paths, offering them time and space for the creation of an ambitious project.

As reported, after its two-decade collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Max Mara Art Prize for Women pivoted into an itinerant event starting this year, traveling to a different country with each edition under the guidance and curation of Alemani, who’s also director and head curator of High Line Art in New York and was the first Italian woman to hold the position of curator of the Venice Art Biennale in 2022.

Each winning artist is given the opportunity to spend a six-month residency in Italy, organized by Collezione Maramotti and specifically tailored to the development of the project proposed to the jury. This work will be exhibited in two solo shows, including the partner institution for the edition — which in Suci’s case is the Museum MACANin Nusantara in Jakarta, Indonesia —and Collezione Maramotti in Italy, which will acquire the works.

Part of a shortlist of five finalists that included Betty Adii, Dzikra Afifah, Ipeh Nur and Mira Rizki, Suci was singled out by a jury comprising also curator Amanda Ariawan, gallerist Megan Arlin, collector Evelyn Halim and artist Melati Suryodarmo, in addition to Alemani and Lau. 

Born in 1985 and based in Yogyakarta, Suci is known for her practice sitting at the intersection of domestic narratives and state political power. Drawing on her everyday experiences as a single mother, her work addresses issues connected to the political domestication of women, authoritarianism and fascism, the patriarchy and capitalism. She explores such themes through different media, including installation, painting, sculpture and video.

Titled “Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice,” the project Suci proposed this time sprung from her desire to investigate the fallout of the encounter between religious artisan traditions and the capitalist system, through a comparative study of Italy and Indonesia. Her research aims to examine whether and how spirituality can endure as a form of cultural resilience even in systems permeated by market dynamics, injustice and oppression. 

Site visits and work in the studio will be part of her creative research, as well as dialogues with religious communities and congregations, university professors and artisans.

To be sure, Suci’s residency will start in Assisi, regarded as the city of Franciscanism nestled in Italy’s Umbria region, where she will have the opportunity to discover the lifestyle of the monks living there, before traveling to Rome to attend a special mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. She will then move to Lecce for an immersion in the craft and history of papier-mâché via a training program designed especially for her. This will be followed by a final period in Florence to learn the technique and historical evolution of egg tempera, to acquire ancient handweaving skills and expand her knowledge of its applications in the ecclesiastic context.

Max Mara Fashion Group’s president Luigi Maramotti underscored how “the rich tradition of Italian craftsmanship, in all its many facets, lies at the very heart of the Max Mara Art Prize, which also aims to bring together two distinct yet complementary worlds, such as art and craftsmanship.”

“I am delighted to see that the first jury appointed for this new global iteration of the prize has courageously upheld and indeed reaffirmed one of its founding values through this choice. It will be interesting to see the outcomes of this exploration and the dialogue between these worlds,” said Maramotti.

Alemani said Suci’s work impressed her for its “extraordinary capacity to transform the realm of everyday domestic life into a realm of political resistance” and that her practice “is perfectly aligned with the core concept of this prize.”

“The unique nature of Dian’s project lies in the analytic gaze it turns on spirituality: not as an escape from reality, but as a resilient response to the invasive influences of capitalism and mass production. Her residency in Italy will be a true cultural dialogue,” said Alemani. 

“This recognition offers me the opportunity to expand my research between Indonesia and Italy, and to learn from traditions and rituals that hold spirituality within the bodies that create,” said Suci, underscoring her commitment “to listen, to learn, and to translate these encounters into forms that honor the intimacy of human labor and the depth of cultural continuity.”

The artist’s work is slated to be showcased in a solo exhibition at Museum MACAN in summer 2027, and at Collezione Maramotti that fall.

A private contemporary art collection, Collezione Maramotti opened to the public in 2007 at the former historical headquarters of the Max Mara company in Reggio Emilia. In addition to a permanent collection of more than 200 works from 1950 to 2019, it regularly presents new projects and commissions from international midcareer and emergent artists.

Previous winners of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women range from, most recently, Dominique White and Emma Talbot, to Margaret Salmon in the first edition, followed by Hannah Rickards.