Martine Gutierrez - Wunderkind

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 58^th 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. Wunderkindinvites 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.

Toys as avatars

In Wunderkind a great many toys – some passed down over generations and preserved since Martine’s childhood, and some created herself – continue to inspire new narratives that are both personal and collective. For idiosyncratic children like Martine, who were expected to conform to rigid cultural norms, toys became avatars. These original collections draw both from her family archives and her multicultural background, fusing autobiography and art.

The artist and her mother

Today Martine goes a step further, emulating the Renaissance celebrities with whom she was compared in her youth. Standing in for Leonardo Da Vinci, she paints a portrait of herself as the famed Mona Lisa, and in Vitruvian woman she depicts the ideal male body as that of her own. In her contemporary reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s The creation of Adam Martine takes the place of Adam and her mother’s outstretched hand that of God, in an intimate dialogue between the artist and her creator.

In 2025 Martine was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her ongoing work on Wunderkind. This long-awaited new work is being exhibited for the first time in Huis Marseille this summer.