2025 ARCO AWARD

The ARCO Community of Madrid Award for Young Artists was established in 2004 to recognize the best work of visual art (including painting, drawing, comics, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, photography, installations, and any other artistic medium, with no restrictions on subject matter or technique) created by artists under the age of 40. Eligible works must be presented at the corresponding edition of the ARCO Fair and have a sale price not exceeding €35,000. The winning piece is acquired by the Community of Madrid and becomes part of the Contemporary Art Collection of the CA2M Museum.

For 2025, the Community of Madrid has awarded the ARCO Prize to artist Mónica Mays for her works Exhausted Disbelief and Hermes, presented by Galería Pedro Cera from Madrid. This award, instituted in 2004, honors the best visual artwork by an artist under 40 years of age exhibited at the corresponding edition of ARCO — in this case, the 44th edition — and the awarded works become part of the collection of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles.

MÓNICA MAYS

Mónica Mays (Madrid, 1990) lives and works in Amsterdam. Her practice focuses on sculpture and installation, intertwining autobiography, material processes, and historical archives. Her works are assemblages that take the form of animated domestic objects that overflow, distort, or transmute. Drawing inspiration from Catholic body horror and Baroque iconography, she explores excess, ornamentation, and exuberance as states in which ambiguity and opacity of meaning can exist. From the representation of illness and magical thinking in female figures to colonial portrayals of nature, domination, desire, and control, Mays uses the Baroque to create works where tension between fragility and violence is ever-present.

After studying Cultural Anthropology at the University of New Orleans, she graduated Cum Laude from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 2015 and obtained a Master's degree from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2017. She has participated in artist residencies such as Rupert (Vilnius), Fundación Bilbao Arte (Bilbao, Spain), Matadero (Madrid), and Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Yogyakarta, Indonesia). Her work has been exhibited at venues including Frascati Theater (Amsterdam), Tallinn Art Hall (Tallinn), Punt WG (Amsterdam), Blue Velvet Projects (Zurich), CentroCentro (Madrid), KUBUS (Hanover), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Industra (Brno), and Atelier Chiffonier (Dijon, France).

Mays was recently awarded the Illy Art Prize ARCO 2024 and was among the nominees for the NN Art Award 2024. Other recognitions include the 3Package Deal grant from the Amsterdam Arts Fund (2022), the Mondriaan Fund Young Artist Stipendium (2023), and the Generación 2022 prize from Fundación Montemadrid.