WINNERS OF ARTE LAGUNA PRIZE | 21st EDITION 2026

The artist particularly impressed the MoCA Association team, who found in Angel Dan a freshness and artistic freedom—partly stemming from his youth—that align with the association’s spirit. The aesthetic and humorous aspects of the artist’s personality provided further motivation.

Her work is a powerful yet elegant and intense combination of materials, merging fragility with strength, playing with textures and light reflection, woth a subtle emotional background resulting in capturing pieces. We believe she would be happy in Shanghai, being able to expand her research and to explore immersed in new inspiring environments.

We selected Kellen Meyer for her thoughtful and distinctive approach to the relationship between art, nature, and ecology. Her practice, rooted in fiber, sculpture, and installation, explores ideas of interconnectedness, coexistence, and our relationship with the natural world through tactile and deeply material processes.
We were particularly drawn to the way Kellen works with organic and found materials, allowing their textures, origins, and inherent qualities to become an essential part of the work. We believe that Costa Rica offers a particularly meaningful environment for her practice. Its extraordinary biodiversity, rich ecosystems, and deep connection between nature and everyday life provide an inspiring context for an artist whose work is so closely connected to the natural world.

Vincenzo Muratore reveals a profound conceptual maturity and an ethical vision of artistic creation, also thanks to his original methodology that combines traditional materials such as marble with contemporary processes such as 3D modeling and robotic milling.

A sound and moving-image artist holding an MMus from Goldsmiths and an MSc in Forestry and Environmental Resources from National Taiwan University, Yi treats ecological data as compositional material. In “In Between Whale Song and Noise Pollution” (2025), rising CO₂ deepens distortion while declining whale populations hollow the reverb; in “Between Strata Pulses and Resonance” (2026), Icelandic field recordings drive transducers that visibly shift volcanic sand across four platforms arranged according to the sites’ actual geography. The jury responded with admiration both for the rigor of this methodology and for Yi’s stated aim for Culver City: a site-responsive, multi-channel installation built from localized ecological data and urban-environmental memory, developed through genuine exchange with the community rather than in isolation.

Based in Toronto, Shirin operates at the intersection of artistry, architectural design, and model-making. Her Living Archive series comprises three-dimensional architectural self-portraits: hand-drafted compositions rendered in watercolor and acrylic, then meticulously cut into shards and mounted upon custom-built wooden frames of varying depth that cast their own shadows. Drawing upon the multi-focal logic characteristic of Persian miniature painting, the series charts the human figure dissolving beyond the frame’s boundaries, leaving behind “symbolic residues”: an abandoned suitcase, a rug, a swing frozen mid-motion, that hold memory within architecture itself. The jury viewed her proposal to translate Culver City’s own architectural forms and urban thresholds into new site-specific relief assemblies as precisely the kind of place-responsive project for which this residency was conceived.

A sculptor hailing from Rijeka, Juraj works in bronze, stone, and clay, crafting a practice that interrogates the profound tensions between strength and collapse, order and instinct, faith and physical force. The jury was captivated by his material intelligence: a dog constructed from copper sheeting that once clad a cathedral angel for three centuries; a falling horse first cast at 34 centimeters before being reborn in clay and polyester at an imposing 270 centimeters; and a Don Quixote whose bronze form has been selected for the Society of Portrait Sculptors’ FACE 2026 exhibition in London. Beyond sculpture, Juraj directs and shoots his own short films, a dual practice that the panel recognized as a natural affinity with a city built upon scenic craft and fabrication.