The Lorenzo il Magnifico Special Award from the President to Tim Bengel

The Florence Biennale confers the Lorenzo il Magnifico Special Award from the President to Tim Bengel for he has originally blended a reminiscence of the Tibetan mandala process with Western imagery and new technology, and shared his work with a wide international audience, whom he has engaged and inspired greatly.

As special guest of our biennial he is going to make two works live for the event, Rome Monument and Floral Freedom.

Born in Ostfildern, near Stuttgart, on 31 December 1991, Tim Bengel studied art and philosophy at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

He has become known for his multimedia works, which encompass performance, live painting and video. He makes two-dimensional images by putting gold leaf along with black and white sand on a sticky surface, an example of which is Versailles. Once completed his creative process with the aforementioned materials, he flips the canvas in vertical position before his audience, thus engaging them in an amazing experience. He preserves the memory of that special moment as well as the action performed by filming a video, which he shares with over 250 million people through social media.

As Sanja Haupt has remarked, “the idea of filming videos to deliver glimpses of his unique technique led Bengel to present his art in a way that is particularly well-suited for the internet and the digital revolution” because it offers “a visual experience that culminates into a reveal climax”.

In 2009 and 2012 he won the 1st Prize for art at the Kunst aus den eigenen Reihen school in Nuertingen (Germany), which he was attending at that time. In 2011 he won the Jugenddesignwettbewerb Hessnatur in Frankfurt, and then the 1st Prize at the Artward International event in Munich (2014), and 1st Prize at the Art Expo Malaysia (2016).

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