The digital edition of Art Verona 2020 hosted and promoted the A Collection residency and production award. The jury – made up of Giovanni Bonotto (President of A Collection), Chiara Casarin (Vice-President of A Collection), Marcello Forin (collector) and Nicola Zanella (cultural manager, founder of Collective and contributor to Arteconomy 24 of Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper) – viewed the galleries taking part in ArtVerona and all the artists represented, examining artists from very different generations and with a range of languages. The aim of the A Collection Residency Prize is to support artists, to present them with a new production project and to let them recount the deeper nature of the artistic project through tapestry. The group unanimously oriented their choice towards Marc Bauer (Geneva, 1975, represented by Gilda Lavia, Rome) for the strength of his pictorial language and the delicate power to be found in his drawings as well as the challenges triggered by his use of colour. For Bauer, who recently won the Meret Oppenheim Prize 2020, the residency in A Collection implies a challenge to measure up against in terms of new cultural and expressive references.

The A Collection Prize for Artefiera in Bologna was awarded to The Cool Couple: an artist duo represented by MLZ Art Dep in Trieste, with the work the worm – time travel stuff (2018), inkjet print on baryta paper, aluminium frame, museum glass, 70 × 55 cm. The jury was comprised of Giovanni Bonotto (president of A Collection), Chiara Casarin (vice-president of A Collection), Diego Bergamaschi, collector, and Maria Chiara Valacchi, art critic and independent curator. Due to its formal and chromatic properties, the selected work lends itself to an interesting and challenging translation into the language of tapestry. The chance to make this work real and three-dimensional adds stimulus to an already highly complex process. Moreover, the research carried out by the Cool Couple – visually investigating scientific and mathematical fields – focuses on contents akin to those of A Collection, in which art and new environmental technologies merge.