Mercedes Hieb
Mercedes Hieb (b. 2000) is a Guatemalan-American multi-disciplinary artist whose work centers on womanhood, divine femininity, spirituality, fate, and her distinct cultural heritage. Born in New York City, she grew up in cities around the world, including London and Hong Kong.
That upbringing surfaces throughout her paintings: distant islands, towering mountains, and star-scattered night skies recur as a way of tying her divergent experiences into one cohesive body of work. Hieb depicts landscapes of far-away places that remain deliberately ambiguous, so that viewers — wherever they're from — can find their own experiences mirrored back to them.
Her exploration of femininity is equally physical: raging red veins, tightly braided hair, and knotted umbilical cords recur as motifs, tracing the connection between female anatomy and outward expression. Haunting self-portraits and surreal depictions of the human form make up the rest of her expanding body of work.
Artist Statement
My paintings begin in the body — in braided hair, red veins, knotted umbilical cords — and move outward into landscapes that don’t belong to any one place. I’m interested in womanhood as something inherited and remade: the physical, spiritual, and cultural threads that tie a woman to the women before her.
Having grown up between New York, London, and Hong Kong, I don’t paint any single homeland. Instead I build ambiguous terrains — mountains, islands, star-filled skies — that hold fragments of everywhere I’ve lived, so the landscapes read as personal to me and recognizable to anyone carrying their own sense of displacement or belonging.
Working across acrylic, cyanotype, and found wood, I use materials that already carry history before I touch them. A panel salvaged from somewhere else becomes a body; a cyanotype exposure becomes skin. The surreal self-portraits and figures that recur throughout my work are less about likeness than about excavation — trying to say, in paint, what I couldn’t explain in words.
If I’ve unsettled you, I’ve done my job.
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