Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the body as a site of identity, presence, and lived experience. I am interested in how the body exists between what is imposed and what is claimed, how it carries expectation, but also holds the ability to define itself. In this work, the figure is no longer performing. She exists in moments of awareness, release, and recognition. Whether through stillness or movement, the body becomes luminous not through perfection, but through honesty. It holds weight, emotion, and memory, while still choosing to take up space. I am not interested in separating beauty from discomfort. I am interested in the full experience of being in a body, seen and unseen, observed and unobserved, shaped and self defined.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hippo Artz is a self taught acrylic painter whose work explores internal landscapes through the body. Centering Black women, her practice moves between surreal and intimate, using distortion, color, and form to express what is often felt but not spoken. Her figures exist in states of tension, awareness, and release, reflecting lived experiences shaped by pressure, expectation, and identity. Through her work, she creates space for complexity, where vulnerability and control, visibility and interiority, can exist at the same time
© Hippo Artz