Dian Suci Wins the 2025–27 Max Mara Art Prize for Women at the Venice Biennale
The 2025–27 Max Mara Art Prize for Women has gone to Indonesian-born artist Dian Suci, whose practice moves between installation, painting, sculpture, and video. The announcement was made today at the opening of the Venice Biennale by Cecilia Alemani, the prize’s curator and jury chair, together with representatives from Museum MACAN, Collezione Maramotti, and the family behind Max Mara.
Founded in 2005, the prize is designed to support mid-career women artists through a six-month traveling residency in Italy, customized to the winning proposal. For Suci, that proposal is “Crafting Spirit: Cultural Dialogues in Heritage and Practice,” a project that will examine spiritual traditions in Italy and Indonesia through artisanal forms of making.
Her itinerary will take her to Assisi, Umbria, Rome, Lecce, and Florence, where she will study how the handcrafting of votive objects and religious images continues to shape contemporary culture. The project is rooted in Suci’s long-standing interest in the overlap between domestic life and political power, a tension that gives her work its particular charge.
In a statement, Suci said the proposal grows out of “stories of the body and memory” in the lives and gestures of women artisans, whose work often exists “between devotion and survival.” That framing places the project within a broader conversation about labor, ritual, and the cultural value of craft at a moment when many artists are rethinking inherited forms through contemporary experience.
The residency will conclude with solo exhibitions at Museum MACAN in Jakarta and at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Collezione Maramotti will also acquire the new works, extending the prize’s support beyond the residency itself.
Alemani said Suci’s work impressed her with its ability to transform domestic life into political resistance, adding that the prize’s tenth edition has chosen to explore the artistic landscape of Indonesia. The selection underscores how the prize continues to connect international visibility with sustained production, while placing women artists at the center of a transnational conversation about material culture, memory, and belief.
