Mateo Gutiérrez is a contemporary artist who makes hand-embroidered artworks that bring into question the underlying culture of violence endemic to American life both personally, politically and historically. Mateo moved to the U.S. at the age of sixteen, and has struggled with his conflicted relationship to the U.S. ever since. He presents both a sociopolitical and a deeply personal reflection on what it means to be American. He challenges the viewer with both a haunting and empathetic view of the traumatic effects of the so-called "American way of life" and also what it means to be an outsider as both foreign born and Latino. He cites his complex experience with the United States as central to his understanding of American cultural practices that are defined by racial and socioeconomic hierarchies engendering violence and xenophobia.​​​
Mateo has exhibited nationally in galleries in Los Angeles, New York and Texas, including multiple museum exhibitions: the Austin Museum of Art, MexicArte Museum and a solo exhibition at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in 2023. Mateo is a featured artists in the 2024-2025 Texas Biennial, the longest running state biennial in the US. Mateo has been featured in New American Painters, Hyperallergic, the Austin American Statesman, The Hartford Courant, Glasstire and other notable journals. Mateo was a resident in the Bronx Art Space Governors Island Residency on Governors Island New York City in 2021, and will be starting a residency in Brooklyn NY at the Textile Art Center in the Fall off 2025. Mateo gave a TEDx talk in 2024 about his series "And I Feel Fine / Y Me Siento Bien". Mateo has a BA in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley and his MFA in studio painting from the University of Texas at Austin. He divides his time between Brooklyn NY and Austin TX.
I am on a mission to expose, and hopefully in doing so help heal, the underlying psychological disorder of violence plaguing men, a violence that is tragically defining of American society and culture at its core, a violence that terrorizes us both within and outside our borders. I am looking directly at the rotten and destructive core of nationhood, imperialism and empire in general and its failed concept of scarcity, fear and exploitation. My work is about seeing, bearing witness, recognition, slowing down and giving us our dignity back from those who try to take it from us. My work is about justice and fairness and inclusion and plain old equality and sharing. My work is about feeling our pain as an act of self dignity as living, breathing humans capable of so much good and so much love for each other right here and now, in this time, today. Through it all and to the very end, I will pronounce my work in solidarity with those who have been harmed at the hands of the few, the vast, vast majority of humanity.
More specifically, I am looking directly at the failed state of American society through the lens of both the actuality of what that means day to day and more largely through the lens of an empire, specifically through the internal and external effects of our violent ways, the ugly modalities that define us through and through, but also not just in actions or laws or cultural narratives, all those things too, but psychologically, fundamentally, asking: Why do we we hate, kill and maim each other, ourselves and so many around the world? I am looking at the effects of this hurt and I'm asking: Why have we constructed this society? How do we tolerate it? Why do we accept it? How much pain are we actually in? In this respect I feel that I am bearing witness to a particularly grotesque period and perhaps end state in American history. I am an artist, not a philosopher, historian, sociologist or anthropologist - I just want to look at the hurt, the real pain, what is actually being felt. I want to give us all a bit of dignity, in this respect, to acknowledge the wrongness of this totally grotesque violation of our being. I want us to have the chance to feel the truth of our pain honestly and deeply so that we may have the chance to hopefully evolve beyond this state where the only solution to all of our problems personally, socially and externally as a nation seems to be violence and the language and practices of war.