Metabolic Sessions, a project exploring contemporary creation by the Instituto Cervantes in Munich, promotes the vision of Spanish-speaking artists of various nationalities. Inspired by Clémentine Deliss’s idea of renewing museums, this project rethinks cultural activities to uncover new perspectives. In 2025, Salta art presents an exhibition by artist Mercedes Azpilicueta.
By revisiting the book An Art Student in Munich, Argentine artist Mercedes Azpilicueta connects the protofeminist perspective of Anna Mary Howitt, who navigated the male- dominated art world of the 19th century, with contemporary themes of diversity, equity and inclusion. Known for exploring radical education and spirituality in art, Azpilicueta amplifies the historically marginalized contributions of women. Her analysis shows how artists like Howitt challenged conventions, highlighting a legacy of voices in the artistic discourse long before their formal recognition.
Through textile works, performance, and installations with objects and drawings, Azpilicueta rethinks art history, giving poetic voice to overlooked narratives and reexamining the legacies of women in art. Aware of the gender inequalities and hierarchies that restricted women’s access to academies, training spaces, and exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Azpilicueta recovers female figures who, despite the limitations they faced, made significant contributions to culture.
For the exhibition, Azpilicueta focuses on the years British artist Anna Mary Howitt spent in Munich, where she arrived in 1850. Associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the daughter of a suffragist mother, Howitt published articles about her life in Germany, which were compiled in the book An Art Student in Munich (1853). Denied the opportunity to develop a career as a painter alongside her male colleagues, Howitt turned to spiritualism, becoming a medium and using drawing to communicate with the beyond. Her mystical drawings are expressions of abstract art, created long before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and other avant-garde artists abandoned figuration. Howitt’s forms do not correspond to empirical experience, and it is precisely this detachment from the visible world that makes her drawings approach the spiritual and the mysterious.
The exhibition features a large-scale installation that includes sculptures, drawings, and carpets inspired by Anna Mary Howitt’s experiences in 19th-century Munich. Three modular sculptures, crafted from second-hand easels, period furniture, leather, and repurposed materials, reference the shared studio space Howitt described in her book. These sculptures, designed in collaboration with Katharina Kasinger, are transformable, emphasizing fluidity, hybridity, and the merging of subjectivities. Azpilicueta’s drawings, integrated into carpets, provide a poetic reimagining of Howitt’s journey, bridging historical narratives with contemporary feminist perspectives. The installation as a whole invites reflection on women’s artistic contributions and the resilience of overlooked histories.
In revisiting Munich—a city that has long nurtured the imagination of artists—she uncovers hidden stories, reaffirming the significance of these silenced voices in shaping culture.
Opening: Friday, 21 March, 6 PM
Duration: 21 March – 18 May
Opening Hours: Thursdays to Sundays, 12-6pm, visits also possible by appointment at info@saltaart.org
Location: Salvatorplatz 4, Luitpoldblock, 80333 Munich
Production in collaboration with Katharina Kasinger
Exhibition design in collaboration with Vanina Scolavino
Presented in collaboration with Instituto Cervantes Munich.
Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) is a visual and performance artist from Buenos Aires who lives and works in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice brings together various characters from the past and present who approach the vulnerable or collective body from a decolonial feminist perspective. Through fluid and associative connections, she counters rigid historical narratives to dismantle them and create space for affective and dissident voices to emerge. Her work manifests in performative and sculptural installations, inspired by speculative and fictional Latin American literature, neobaroque art history, contemporary popular culture, and new materialism theory. Through collaborative and interdisciplinary practices, she combines “precarious” craft-based techniques—historically associated with obsolete domestic knowledge—with industrialized productions.
She was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam
in 2015-16 and received the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in 2017. Her solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Göttingen (2023); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2022); Gasworks, London (2021); CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2021); Museion, Bolzano/Bozen (2020); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); CentroCentro, Madrid (2019); and MAMBA, Buenos Aires (2018). Her work has been presented at Villa Vassilieff, Paris; REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles; MACBA, Barcelona (all in 2018); CA2M, Móstoles (2017); Onomatopee, Eindhoven (2016); TENT, Rotterdam (2015); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014). Azpilicueta was nominated for the Prix de Rome 2021.