Acme Studios — Paolo Salvador Awarded the Inaugural Orsman Road Studio Award

Supporting Artists since 1972

Paolo Salvador Awarded the Inaugural Orsman Road Studio Award

Paolo Salvador has been awarded the inaugural Orsman Road Studio Award and is the first artist selected for this new ten-year programme at Acme.

The Orsman Road Studio Award provides a large self-contained studio at Acme’s Orsman Road building in Hackney, alongside a £4,000 materials budget. Established to support mid-career painters facing barriers to accessing adequate workspace, the award enables artists to dedicate sustained time to developing their studio practice.

"I am very grateful for the award, which comes at a significant moment in my career," said Salvador. "It provides the space, structure, and continuity to strengthen my practice, rebuild a studio rhythm, develop new projects, and become more rooted in London’s artistic community."

Jon Opie, Head of Artist Support at Acme, added: "Congratulations to Paolo, the first recipient of the Orsman Road Studio Award. Specifically for mid-career painters, the selectors felt that Paolo made an excellent case for how the studio context would support him to make a new body of work and why it was important now at a critical moment in his career. We look forward to working with Paolo over the next two years."

Beginning in 2026, the programme will support five artists over a ten-year period through a series of two-year residencies. As the inaugural awardee, Salvador will begin his residency in August 2026.

About the artist

Paolo Salvador (b. 1990, Lima, Peru) is a painter whose work fuses Peruvian cosmology, personal memory, and material experimentation. Drawing on mythologies, oral traditions, and the biodiversity of the Amazon and Andes, his paintings unfold as immersive worlds where humans, animals, and nature exist in states of transformation. His practice is shaped by a tactile and intuitive approach to painting, exploring how materials, surfaces, and images can carry histories of migration, cultural memory, and hybrid belief systems.

Salvador received an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019.