Mercedes Felgueres

Mercedes Felgueres was born in Mexico City, studied architecture, and worked as an architect and interior designer. Since 1994, the artist has lived and worked in Germany, since 2002 in Munich, and since 2025 in Marina Alta. Numerous solo exhibitions and participation in group shows in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Mexico have made her experimental painting known internationally. Mercedes Felgueres’ paintings narrate a life between cultures, her experiences with a new beginning in Germany. Her work is characterized by a virtuoso handling of color, which she applies in layers and often in the warm, bright tones of her homeland. The images are an invitation: a call to explore an abstract pictorial world that each viewer can make their own.
Mercedes Felgueres uses various techniques, primarily painting, but
the term “painting” seems too restrictive for her works, which are composed of many layers and materials. In addition to acrylics and pigments, the artist also uses materials such as wax, asphalt, graphite, sand, and even gold leaf—all of which are essential elements of her work. She also uses papers obtained from the bark of trees in her native Mexico: sometimes she uses their highly structured surfaces as stencils for applying paint. Mercedes Felgueres also works with classic collage materials, such as newspaper or magazine clippings. In her later works, she primarily uses her own digital photographs, for example, fragments of television films. By separating the image elements from their original context and transferring them to a new one, surprising effects of distancing are created, which, however, do not become foreground: the artist takes special care to integrate the different materials and elements into the overall composition of an image.