Harriet Mena Hill

Harriet Mena Hill was born in London and studied painting at Camberwell. She paints imagined architectural and geometric landscapes with fine and delicate detail, and with a depth that unfailingly draws the viewer in to the work.

“Harriet Mena Hill makes delicate paintings of towers, arcades and interiors, field patterns and mazy structures that are pure invention yet wonderfully credible. They stand close in spirit to the metaphysical cities of de Chirico, and the endlessly ascending steps of Escher, but more romantic, less contrary and disturbing. But they too are possessed of a quality of dream. She paints figures into these strange imagined spaces as she is working to give them scale, only to remove them at the last – and it is perhaps this sense of a human presence lately there, moved just out of sight, waiting and watching, that gives the paintings their gently haunted quality. And the less overtly decorative and concerned with superficial pattern, the more their complication emerges as a function of the pictorial structure itself, the better they are.”

William Packer: Financial Times, 22 February 2000