Launch of the PrintLitoArt Special Prize – Premio Combat 2026

Within the framework of the XVII edition of the Premio Combat, a new and significant recognition is introduced: the Special Prize – PrintLitoArt, promoted by PrintLitoArt, an Italian industrial atelier specialized in the production of certified fine art lithographs.

PrintLitoArt

The prize is conceived with the aim of enhancing lithography as a contemporary artistic language and as a means of disseminating artistic practice, fostering a dialogue between creative research and the highest standards of technical execution. The award includes the production, at the PrintLitoArt atelier in Salerno, of a lithographic edition of 30 numbered copies, embossed with the dry seal of the Masters in the Art of Printing. The edition will be developed in close collaboration with the artist and in full respect of the author’s intent, ensuring quality, coherence, and long-term recognizability.

PrintLitoArt operates as an independent production partner at the service of artistic creation, supporting artists and galleries through a rigorous, traceable, and certified editorial production process. Rooted in the territory of Salerno and the Amalfi Coast – an area boasting more than eight centuries of history in papermaking and fine art printing – PrintLitoArt translates this cultural continuity into a structured production method and a deep responsibility toward the artwork.

The lithographic edition will represent the tangible outcome of this collaboration: a certified, numbered work conceived for collectors, designed to expand the visibility and recognition of the artist’s practice.

PrintLitoArt collaborates with several local institutions active in the art sector, including the Filiberto and Bianca Menna Foundation, with which it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at the production of artists’ lithographs and the publication of a catalogue dedicated to the works created within the framework of this collaboration.

Hernan Bas - The Visitors. The Exhibition at Ca' Pesaro

With over thirty new paintings presented within an immersive installation conceived specifically for the museum, Hernan Bas (Miami, 1978) brings The Visitors to Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art, in the Dom Pérignon Rooms.

Hernan Bas, Alone with Lisa (the Louvre, Paris), 2025, Acrylic and water based oil on linen, 127 x 101.6 cm © Hernan Bas Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro

Drawing inspiration from Venice—a city particularly sensitive to tourism, constantly reshaped by its consequences, and where the artist undertook a residency—Bas has created a new body of work centered on tourists placed within both imagined and real settings. The protagonists—predominantly white, Western men—inhabit a shifting terrain of “bucket-list” attractions, historic sites, sacred spaces, seedy venues, and sanitized versions of the natural world. The works highlight tourism clichés, from the Mona Lisa and the Trevi Fountain to destinations associated with so-called dark tourism, such as Chernobyl, Alcatraz, and the Aokigahara forest—sites marked by pain that become stops along curated itineraries. These tourist traps further underscore the fundamental disconnection between the “visitors” and the worlds they traverse: places designed to deceive, exploit, or disappoint.

Bas has long been celebrated for his narrative works infused with humor, decadence, eccentricity, occult undertones, and layered codes. He explores the complexities of personal identity through figures suspended in moments of transformation, where the ordinary slips into the extraordinary. In The Visitors, this sensibility turns outward. Like the dandies and flâneurs of Bas’s earlier works, these new figures hover on thresholds—between curiosity and arrogance, encounter and violation, experience and spectacle.

Many of these new figures appear caught in acts of performance or fabrication, posing, taking photographs, or adopting disguises. One of Bas’s tourists claims resident status; another (American) pretends to be Canadian; and yet another visitor in Thailand stages an encounter with a python. In a dynamic typical of Bas’s ironic sensibility, a feeling of affection for his awkward and disoriented visitors collides with a lucid critique of an era defined by globalization, stripped of stable cultural or geographic reference points.

Part of this new body of work was created during the artist’s residency in Venice, in close contact with the lagoon, its light, its painterly tradition, and its tourists. In these paintings, the visitor becomes both painter and painted subject. In recent decades, the historic city of Venice has suffered from the rise of mass tourism, which has damaged its monuments, lagoon, residents, and history. Venice itself—long shaped by exchange and now strained by mass tourism—becomes both the setting and the mirror of the issues addressed in the works. Bas also channels his lifelong understanding of what it means to live alongside tourists in Miami, as well as his own condition as a first-generation Cuban American, often perceiving himself as a visitor in his own home.

Displayed in an immersive sequence, the canvases form a continuous visual narrative. Photographic framing, saturated surfaces, and accumulations of telling details—slogans, tattoos, accessories—function as contemporary vanitas, revealing the moral ambiguities inherent in global mobility. Here, Bas captures a generation adrift—simultaneously searching for meaning and absorbed in itself—inviting viewers to recognize, within this suspended world, their own reflection.

Hernan Bas, One last round (Oktoberfest), 2025, Acrylic on linen, 254 x 101.6 cm © Hernan Bas Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, Perrotin and Victoria Miro

As Elisabetta Barisoni, Head of Ca’ Pesaro and curator of the exhibition, notes: “In the rooms of the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice, we are welcomed by a procession of figures who, at first glance, seem to represent youth immersed in the discovery of the world, but who instead reveal an absurd, paradoxical, even comic situation.

The monumental series,” Barisoni further observes, “depicts a vision that is constantly before our eyes—one shaped by gullible tourism, voyeurism, and behavior that pushes beyond the limits of respect for others and, in extreme cases, for human dignity. In works that at first appear to be souvenir snapshots or exotic keepsakes, history and memory begin to waver, while the very sense of reality starts to fracture.”

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Tate Modern presents the largest ever survey exhibition celebrating the groundbreaking work of world-renowned artist Dame Tracey Emin (b.1963). Emin’s commitment to unapologetic self-expression has transformed our understanding of what art can be and continues to influence contemporary art today, using the female body to explore passion, pain and healing.

Tracey Emin, I never Asked to Fall in Love - You made me Feel like This 2018 © Tracey Emin

Spanning her extraordinary 40-year practice - from seminal installations made in the 1990s, to recent paintings and bronzes going on display for the first time - A Second Life marks the most significant exhibition of Emin’s career, tracing the key life events that have shaped her journey and transformation. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, it brings together over 100 works encompassing painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation, demonstrating her raw approach to sharing experiences of love, trauma and personal growth.

Charting Emin’s lifelong commitment to painting, the show begins by presenting works from her first solo exhibition at White Cube, My Major Retrospective 1982-93, comprising a series of tiny photographs of her art school paintings from the 1980s which she destroyed following a difficult period of her life. These are shown alongside Tracey Emin CV 1995, a self-portrait and first-person narration of her life up until that moment and the poignant video work Why I Never Became A Dancer 1995, in which the artist recounts traumatic events from her teenage years in Margate. Together, these early works introduce visitors to Emin’s instantly recognisable first-person voice and intimate storytelling.

Emin's deep-rooted connection to her hometown of Margate has been a constant thread throughout her practice. Leaving Margate aged 15, Emin returned intermittently during her late teens and early 20s before moving to London in 1987 to study at the Royal College of Art. After witnessing her mother’s passing in Margate in 2016 and surviving cancer in 2020, Emin returned to the seaside town, making it her permanent home and establishing the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, a free studio-based art school. Tate Modern is showcasing works from Emin’s life centred around Margate and memories of her childhood, exploring how she revisits and retells her personal history. Emphasising the turbulent years she spent there, Mad Tracey From Margate: Everybody’s Been There 1997 lays bare her most intimate thoughts through handstitched phrases, letters and drawings, while the wooden rollercoaster It's Not the Way I Want to Die 2005 takes inspiration from the town’s famous amusement park Dreamland to reflect on her anxieties and vulnerabilities.

Emin frequently confronts personal trauma and pain, dispelling the stigma surrounding issues that are often left undiscussed. The exhibition addresses the artist’s experience of sexual assault, including the neon I could have Loved my Innocence 2007 and the embroidered calico Is This a Joke 2009. In one of her most personal video works, How It Feels 1996, Emin gives a challenging yet empowering account of an abortion that went wrong, describing institutional neglect, the physical and psychological implications of refusing motherhood, and the misogyny associated with it. Shown publicly for the first time, the quilt The Last of the Gold 2002 is emblazoned with an ‘A to Z of abortion’, providing advice for women facing a similar situation. 

At the heart of the show sit two seminal installations: Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made 1996 and My Bed 1998. The first documents a period of three weeks where Emin locked herself in a Stockholm gallery attempting to reconcile her relationship with painting, which she had abandoned six years prior after her experience of abortion. This is followed by Emin’s iconic Turner-Prize nominated installation, documenting her recovery from an alcohol-fuelled breakdown. These extraordinary works move the visitor from Emin's first life to her second life, post illness and surgery.  

Tracey Emin, I followed you to the end 2024. Yale Centre for British Art. © Tracey Emin.

Emin's experience of cancer, surgery and disability are directly addressed in the exhibition, emphasising her disregard for any separation of the personal and public. The recent bronze sculpture Ascension 2024, exploring Emin’s new relationship with her body following major surgery for bladder cancer, is joined by new photographs showing the stoma that she now lives with.

The exhibition culminates with the artist exploring the dimensions of her second life in painting. While pain and heartbreak are still present, Emin’s ambitious large-scale paintings offer a transcendent, spiritual quality, showing a resolute determination to live in the present. Never without a darker side, the sculpture Death Mask 2002 sits amongst these expansive paintings illustrating a life lived to the full. Moving beyond the gallery walls, the monumental bronze I Followed You Until The End 2023 commands the landscape outside Tate Modern, inviting passersby to experience Emin’s groundbreaking, visceral work.

Dame Tracey Emin said “I’m very excited about having a show at Tate Modern. For me, it’s one of the greatest international contemporary art museums in the world and it’s here in London. I feel this show, titled ‘A second Life’, will be a bench mark for me. A moment in my life when I look back and go forward. A true celebration of living”