There are few prizes that have consistently shifted the axis of contemporary art like the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. This year, in a gesture of quiet but resounding celebration, Max Mara marks two decades of the Prize’s transformative legacy with Time for Women! Empowering Visions in 20 Years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women – an exhibition staged at the iconic Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, from April 17 to August 31, 2025.

Across the subterranean spaces of La Strozzina, the works of nine past winners – including Helen Cammock, Laure Prouvost, and Dominique White – are brought into conversation for the first time. It's an anthology of female creativity shaped during the artists’ bespoke Italian residencies: a sensuous mapping of identity, memory, mythology, and the politics of place. Installations, video works, sculpture and wall pieces build a narrative that feels both deeply personal and culturally expansive – a reminder that art, like women, cannot be contained.

Since 2005, the Max Mara Art Prize for Women – founded with Whitechapel Gallery and later joined by Collezione Maramotti – has been a rarity: a biennual award that gifts artists not only recognition but the gift of time. Six months of immersion across Italy, tailored to nourish practice and possibility. In return, the artists have shaped new futures: for themselves, for the canon.

At a time when the cultural landscape still tilts unevenly, Time for Women! feels less like an anniversary and more like a call to attention. To look again. To take seriously the visions of those who have, so often, been made to wait their turn.

Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that the future is written by those who dare to imagine it first.

Time for Women! opens at Palazzo Strozzi on 17 April 2025, and the exhibition will conclude on 31 August 2025. You can purchase tickets online on the Palzzo Strozzi website.