Mónica Mays
Mónica Mays
Mónica Mays (b. 1990 Madrid) lives and works in Amsterdam. Her practice involves sculpture and installation, enmeshing autobiography, material process and historical archive. Her pieces are composed of assemblages taking the shape of animated domestic objects that are spilling over, distorted or in a process of transmutation. Drawing from catholic body horror and baroque iconography she has been working with excess, ornamentation and exuberance as states where in-between and opacity of meaning can exist. From the depiction of maladie and magical thinking in female figurines, to colonial representations of nature, dominance, desire and control, the baroque is deployed by Mays to create works that exist in a tension of fragility and violence.
Having studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of New Orleans, she graduated Cum Laude from the École Superieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in 2015 and received an MA from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2017. She has developed projects in artistic residencies such as Rupert (Vilnius), Fundación Bilbao Arte (Bilbao, Spain) and Matadero (Madrid, Spain) and Cemeti Institut for Art and Society (Jakarta). Her works have been exhibited in spaces such as the Frascati Theater (Amsterdam), Tallinn Art Hall (Tallinn), Punt WG (Amsterdam), Blue Velvet Projects (Zurich), Centro Centro (Madrid), KUBUS (Hannover), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Industra (Brno) and Atelier Chiffonier (Dijon, France). She has been awarded the 3PD prize bestowed by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts 2022, the Mondriaan Fonds Young Artist Stipendium 2023 and the Generation 2022 prize from the Montemadrid Foundation.