Salta art launches a five-month Studio Grant for an artist who has recently graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
From February to June 2026, the grant provides a shared ground-floor studio within the Empfangshalle artists’ collective in Maxvorstadt, near Munich’s Museumsquartier.
The artist receives a fixed workstation and flexible access to workshop areas.The grant also includes support for materials and, through the support of MakerSpace, monthly access to MakerSpace Munich via a MakerPlus membership, providing fully equipped workshops and a collaborative production environment.
Artists are nominated by Professors Nicole Wermers and Gabriel Kuri, with final selection by Salta art. The Studio Grant reinforces Salta art’s commitment to artistic exchange by supporting emerging local artists at a formative stage of their practice.
This year’s grant is awarded to Carmen Arias.
About Carmen Arias
Carmen Arias’s practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and sound, engaging with the city as a constructed body, shaped by political, social, and historical forces. Working with materials such as latex, ceramic, plaster, concrete, steel, and sound, she draws from overlooked architectural and infrastructural elements—manholes, ladders, pipes, ventilation systems, underground passages—transforming them through shifts in scale, material, and function. Her works often emerge from research and fieldwork and move between public space and exhibition contexts, where sculptural objects are activated through performative gestures or spoken text.
Approaching urban space as a material archive, Arias investigates how cities regulate bodies, movement, and visibility, while also holding subversive potential. Casting, doubling, and reproduction play a central role in her practice, both formally and conceptually, allowing her to question how memory is embedded in objects and built environments. Through tactile forms that oscillate between the familiar and the estranged, her work invites a physical relationship with sculpture that foregrounds experience, resistance, and transformation.
Carmen Arias (Santander, 1999) lives and works in Munich. She is represented by Juan Silió Gallery, Madrid. She studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and graduated from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich, where she studied sculpture with Hermann Pitz, Jumana Manna, Katinka Bock, and Gabriel Kuri. Her work has been shown at Akademiegalerie Munich, Kunstpavillon Munich, Public Art Munich, Eres Projects (Munich), Neuwerkshop (Munich), and Galerie Juan Silió (Madrid), among others.