Dionysis Saraji has been awarded the Art Up 2025 Graphic/Illustration Prize as part of Opentour.

Dionysis Saraji, Bestiario, 2025, pigment on Lokta paper, glazed ceramic, variable dimensions.

Last night, in the Aula Magna of the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, the winners of the Art Up Prize were announced. This award, created by the Zucchelli Foundation as part of Opentour, is made possible thanks to the financial support of Fondazione Carisbo, Banca di Bologna, the Falconi Leidi Collection, and the Lucio Saffaro Foundation. This year, it involved 115 artistic proposals and the participation of 26 galleries and exhibition spaces across the city.

The Art Up jury, chaired by Lorenzo Balbi — Artistic Director of MAMbo - Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, President of AMACI - the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, and curator — also included Davide Ferri, Artistic Director of Arte Fiera 2026, critic and curator, and collector Claudia Consolandi, President of ACACIA - Friends of Italian Contemporary Art Association. Together, they evaluated the contemporary artworks submitted for the competition and assigned five distinct awards.

The Graphic/Illustration Award, funded by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, was granted to Bestiario by Dionysis Saraji (on display at Casa Saraceni, Bologna).

Dionysis Saraji (b. 2001, Venice, Italy) is a visual artist of Iranian and Greek descent. His vibrant hybrid figures draw on Persian decorative traditions (as filtered through paternal memories and traditional symbols from miniatures and carpets) and Greek mythology. Working across ceramic sculpture, drawing, and textiles, the artist explores the fluidity of the body and the fine line between reality and fiction. These themes are reimagined playfully, painted in bright colors and tangled lines, where the body continuously transforms in the transition between sculpture and drawing.

In Bestiario, Saraji's mythopoetic creatures inhabit a festively ambiguous space between innocence and subversion, appearing in the full process of their becoming. The artist thus proposes a queer ontology of play, celebration, and metamorphosis. His is a poetics of joy and, at the same time, a politics of transformation. Vivid colors and reworked forms from different cultures converge to redraw a new map—one where the micro (the artist’s personal story and gender transition experience) intertwines with the macro: global realities of migration, the struggle for self-determination, and the search for identity within the diasporic experience.