Héctor Correa Massiel (born 1973, Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico) is a painter and visual artist known for bold figurative-abstract works that engage deeply with social realities, emotional expression, and power dynamics. His practice often integrates mixed media, powerful narratives, and expressive colour to explore themes of violence, identity, memory, and resilience.
Massiel studied painting at the National School of Plastic Arts (Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas), Taxco Campus, now part of UNAM’s Faculty of Arts and Design. Over more than two decades, he has built a prolific career nationally and internationally. In 2016, he presented his first major retrospective, bringing together around forty works that spanned a decade of his creative production, including paintings, mixed-media works, and small-format pieces that together highlighted the evolution of his technique and vision.
Working primarily in mixed media, Massiel often combines acrylic, tar (chapopote), charcoal, and found objects. His expressive style dramatizes emotional states—rage, sadness, hope—through intense colour, textured surfaces, and figurative distortion. Recurring themes include social violence and injustice in his native Guerrero, memory and trauma in both personal and collective forms, marginality and displacement through strange, wandering figures, and resilience or redemption, where even dark imagery holds threads of endurance. His practice frequently incorporates art-object techniques, transforming everyday materials or debris into symbolic visual elements.
His career includes important exhibitions such as his 2016 retrospective “Retro-Espectiva” in Acapulco; Fragmentados. Vestigios del huracán Otis, a body of work created in response to the devastation of Hurricane Otis using found materials like metal, roofing, antennas, and other debris; Periferia, a group show in Mexico City addressing identity and social critique; and a presentation at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, marking a significant international milestone. Massiel has also participated in numerous national and international group shows, fairs, and cultural projects focused on social justice, history, and collective memory.
He has received major recognitions including First Place at the Pacific Biennial of Painting and Printmaking “Paul Gauguin”; Honorable Mention at the Alfonso Pérez Romo Biennial of Plastic Arts; Honorable Mention at the XII National Itinerant Plastic Creation Encounter (Sinaloa 10×10); First Prize (ex aequo) in the International Visual Arts Competition “Antonio Gualda” in Granada, Spain; and the International Arts Award “Memorial Lucía Martínez,” also in Spain.
Massiel’s works are held in private collections in Mexico and abroad. Through his exhibitions and thematic focus, he has become an important voice in dialogues around violence, inequality, and memory in contemporary Mexican art. His ability to merge painting with sculptural found materials contributes to a unique form of emotionally and politically engaged art.
Rooted in emotional truth and social critique, Massiel’s practice confronts painful realities—violence, loss, marginalisation—while creating space for reflection, healing, and transformation. His expressive mixed-media style resists categorisation, blending painterly gesture with physical fragments of lived experience. Across decades, he has developed a body of work that is raw yet refined, socially aware yet deeply personal, and ever committed to revealing the complexities of the human condition.
