Most people who show up at Art Expo New York are just artists. María Esther Panesso Mercado is also a lawyer.

The Colombian-born painter is beginning to attract attention at one of the city’s biggest art fairs, Art Expo New York 2026, running through April 12 at Pier 36, is not your typical gallery darling. By day, she defends women in vulnerable situations in Colombian courtrooms. By night, she is in her studio, layering oil and texture onto canvas, creating luminous female figures that have landed on walls in Paris, Miami, and Tokyo. 

The Woman Who Refused to Pick a Lane

María Esther Panesso Mercado, who signs her paintings simply as Mercado, was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1987. She holds a law degree and a degree in International Business Administration from Universidad de La Sabana, and an MBA from IE Business School in Madrid. She is, by any measure, an overachiever in the traditional sense.

But somewhere between the courtroom and the lecture hall, art kept pulling her back.

“Art has always been my most honest language,” she says. “From a young age, I felt a deep need to express emotion, memory, and strength through visual form.”

She never quit law. She never quit business either. Instead, she built a career that operates on two tracks simultaneously and has somehow managed to become seriously accomplished on both. Forbes Colombia named her one of the 50 Most Creative Colombians in the World. She has exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the legendary exhibition founded in 1903 that once showcased Matisse and Picasso. And now she is here, in New York, at one of the most important contemporary art fairs in the country.

The art world tends to reward people who fit neatly into a box. Mercado’s career has often challenged that assumption.

What Happened in Her Childhood Changed Everything She Paints

To understand Mercado’s work, you have to understand where it comes from. She lost her father when she was still young. Her mother stepped up, became the head of the household, and raised her children with what Mercado describes as quiet, unshakeable strength.

That image never left her.

It is why every painting she makes is centered on women. Not women as decorative subjects, not women as passive figures gazing softly into the distance. Women as forces. Women as the people who hold everything together while the world looks the other way.

She signs every painting with her maternal surname, Mercado, not her paternal one. It is her way of saying, every single time she puts brush to canvas, that this is for her mother. That the work is a tribute.

Her legal career deepened that conviction. Years of defending women in Colombia’s courts, women facing poverty, abuse, and systemic disadvantage, gave her a front row seat to what real resilience looks like. It transformed the way she paints.

“Witnessing both fragility and extraordinary strength in real life transformed the way I portray women in my paintings,” she says. “They are not passive figures. They embody power, transcendence, and inner light.”

Her Paintings Look Like Nothing Else in the Room

One of the more recognizable elements of Mercado’s work is its use of contrast.

Her backgrounds are thick, textured, at times quite pronounced, layers of mixed media built up until the surface has genuine physical depth. Then, against that turbulent ground, her figures appear smooth and radiant. Ballet dancers mid-flight. Coastal women standing tall. Feminine forms lit by gold that seems to come from inside the canvas rather than from any external source.

She calls the concept “Dualidades del Alma,” Dualities of the Soul. The idea is that every woman contains multitudes: vulnerability and strength, sacrifice and beauty, discipline and grace. The ballet dancer is her favorite symbol for this. Behind every effortless performance is a body marked by years of pain and work. The dancer makes it look easy. She is not.

Mercado sees that same story in every woman she has ever represented in court.

It presents a relatively cohesive vision for someone who, on paper, should probably be running a law firm full-time. But that is exactly what makes her interesting. She is not splitting her focus. She appears to be building on it, which adds further depth to the work.

Colombia itself shaped that richness. A country of extraordinary cultural depth, of resilience forged through decades of adversity, of communities that transform difficulty into creativity. Mercado carries all of that with her to every international exhibition. For her, showing up in Paris or New York with paintings inspired by Colombian women is not just a career move. It is a responsibility.

She is building toward more: museum-level exhibitions, a wider collector base in the US and Europe, and eventually a foundation to support emerging female artists. She speaks about all of it with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who has already done harder things.

And she probably has. Try defending women in a Colombian courtroom in the morning and finishing a painting destined for a Paris gallery by midnight. Then tell someone you cannot do two things at once.

María Esther Panesso Mercado is exhibiting at Art Expo New York 2026. Follow her work on Instagram at @mariamercadoarte.