The Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) congratulates HfG graduate Juliana Vargas Zapata on receiving the Giovanni Francesco Marchini Scholarship. In 2026, the Lions Club Bruchsal Schloss in cooperation with the Bruchsal Art Association will be awarding the scholarship for the fifth time.

The Giovanni Francesco Marchini Scholarship is awarded every two years to graduates of the HfG in Karlsruhe and is unique in the German art prize landscape in its combination of a one-year working scholarship, a solo exhibition at the Bruchsal art association “Das Damianstor” e.V. and an art project that the scholarship holders carry out with pupils from a Bruchsal school. A jury of representatives from the University of Art and Design, the Lions Club Bruchsal Schloss and the Bruchsal Art Association awarded the Giovanni Francesco Marchini Scholarship for 2026 to the interdisciplinary artist Juliana Vargas Zapata from among four candidates at a selection meeting at the HfG in Karlsruhe. Born in Colombia, the prizewinner studied communication design at the HfG in Karlsruhe from 2017 to 2025, where she has also lived and worked for 10 years. Her works have already been presented in exhibitions at the HfG in Karlsruhe, at the ifa Gallery in Berlin, in Brussels and in Bogotá.

Juliana Vargas Zapata's practice combines archival methods, artistic research, object and image production to explore the intersections between popular culture, material culture and Latin American vernacular design. In her diploma project “In Defense of Mis Caprichos”, she is developing a personal image archive from found and her own motifs that reflects the fragmentation of digital imagery and focuses on everyday visual codes. From this archive, she creates objects, assemblages and video installations that use appropriation, copying and transformation as central strategies to explore visual sensibility and cultural meanings. For the exhibition at Damianstor, existing works are combined with new, site-specific works, with the architecture and history of the location serving as a subtle framework for the dialog between archive, objects and space. The result is a multi-layered examination of visual culture and everyday aesthetics.

Further information on the upcoming exhibition: http://www.damianstor.de/