La Casa en la Montaña

When Diana Mercado was a child in Ecuador, her grandfather would point at lights flickering on the dark mountains outside the kitchen window: "There, look! The princesses hurrying to hide their gold!" His tale was of Inca princesses hiding Atahualpa's ransom from Pizarro.

Here are 16 of her paintings from two London shows: Memories of the Andes (2023), about leaving Ecuador as a child, and A Tale of the Andes (2025), built on that story. A painting and a poem written for this exhibition link the two. The house in the title stands for the country she left, and you keep meeting the same mountains, in landscapes and in paintings of women. Most of us sit through a relative's one story every Thanksgiving; Mercado begged to hear hers again.

Admission is free with a suggested $10 donation; the gallery is closed Mondays. A guide to the show is on the Bloomberg Connects app, and on 19 November at 6:15pm Mercado talks about it with IA&A's Katie Larson.