Martine Gutierrez - Wunderkind

Is an artist born or made? Is a person’s identity set from birth, or discovered later? Martine Gutierrez addresses these questions in a large-scale solo exhibition, Wunderkind, emphasising the importance of creativity and expression – qualities that characterised her childhood and made her the internationally celebrated artist she has since become.

Identity is a performance
An interdisciplinary artist, Martine Gutierrez works with photography, video, music and performance. Through self-portraiture and cinematic tableaus she reimagines identity, not only as material but also as method. At the 58th Venice Biennale she captured the global art world’s attention with a series of shape-shifting self-portraits in which her body serves as the focus of transformation and critique. ‘Identity is a performance,’ she says. ‘With a bit of practice you can be almost anything.’

Childhood as the ‘threshold of selfhood’ Martine sees childhood as the ‘threshold of selfhood’ and art was always her medium, in a deliberate, continuous practice of personal reinvention. The exhibition Wunderkind pieces together the riddle that is Martine, using never before seen artworks that date back to her childhood.

Martine Gutierrez was born in 1989, the child of an American mother and a Guatemalan father. From an early age she played with the expectations attached to names and appearances, adding an ‘e’ to her name Martín in order to avoid being gender-stereotyped. In her earliest experiments Martine was already using art to address the central challenge of childhood: to determine who you are and how you want to be seen. Her current, layered identity as a transgender woman of mixed extraction and her ‘stand-ins’ in self-portraits are an extension of these childhood creations, in which reality and myth remain fluid and convertible. Wunderkind invites the viewer into Martine’s world – building a portrait of a life in perpetual performance, and revealing the foundations of an artistic practice rooted in the continuous construction and deconstruction of the self.