After decades of artistic work, artist Margo Guttmann is making her work comprehensively accessible to the public for the first time from 27 March 2026. In a concentrated solo presentation at the Miettinen Collection – following her recent participation in the group exhibition Faces of Mind at HausKunstMitte – a remarkable discovery is hinted at: the powerful work of an artist whose oeuvre, developed over decades, is now becoming visible and invites further discovery.
Image above: Margot Guttmann; Liberty, 2022; Öl auf Leinwand, 240 x 180 cm © Margo Guttmann; Foto: Ludger Paffrath.
Fighters dominate Margo Guttmann’s large-format images. They radiate vulnerability, but also strength and determination. Aggressive and self-confident, they defy their wounds. Bare muscles are visible. Bandages and perhaps also metallic applications act as armour. Damaged, yet unwavering, these figures stride forward. Hybrid beings, posthuman, as if from a science fiction or manga comic. Half human, half machine. Yet the composition of the images is familiar, almost iconic.
In the background, contrasting with the canvas-white staff, monochrome surfaces or surreal landscape impressions. Angular shapes, like breaking ice floes. Rounded surfaces like pools of blood. Fluttering flags. Landscapes as backdrops against which a very minimal plot unfolds.
Man and machine. Deus ex machina. Man as god and creator. There are many references to philosophy and art history in Guttmann’s works, from Leonardo da Vinci to Masereel.
The struggle speaks from these images. An existential struggle, as it has been repeatedly addressed in art history – whether in religious imagery or in realistic scenes from the 20th century. In Guttmann’s paintings, all of this is captured on canvas as a substrate.
Small motifs such as drones buzzing around or tank barriers hinted at by rough strokes on the horizon suggest that this struggle is also located in the present.
Struggle is not always war. In the case of the Polish-born artist, struggle can also be understood in a very personal sense. The struggle as a teenager from a modest background to be allowed to attend art school. The struggle as a young immigrant in the early 1980s to gain a foothold in West Berlin without a penny in her pocket. And later, having to assert herself in the business world. The people she encountered in this society, Margo Guttmann says, were ‘machines and monsters who know no compassion, who always carry a knife in their trouser pockets and are always ready to strike.’ When the artist came to West Berlin in the early 1980s, it was the era of the Young Wild Ones in art. The Moritzboys from Kreuzberg 36 were setting the tone in the walled city. It was also the renaissance of figurative painting. Guttmann was impressed by how ‘freely and generously painters like Rainer Fetting and Salomé used colour’. Art critics at the time wrote about the expressiveness, brutality and aggressive colours of the paintings. Echoes of this and of how figures were staged can also be found in Guttmann’s current works.
‘If I hadn’t lived the way I did, my paintings wouldn’t be what they are,’ says Guttmann. She describes her paintings, both large and small, as abstract diaries. However, the stories she creates in her motifs are not to be understood as purely autobiographical, but rather as symbolic. The figures depicted are not self-portraits. Gender-neutral and without a recognisable age, the combatants are chargeable placeholders for the viewers, projection surfaces. What or who is being fought for here deliberately eludes clarity.
In her self-image, Margo Guttmann wants to break through society’s role expectations regarding gender and age. The severed limbs lie by the wayside, the strangled necks are stages along the way, not the end point. Guttmann’s oil paintings are so intense because, despite all the brutality depicted and staged, they do not appear destructive and depressing, but aggressive. Concentrated energy, frozen movement. The artist is not so much interested in the surface, but rather creates an expression for her inner self. ‘I can do nothing but scream and murder in my paintings.’
This energy is also present in her black-and-white drawings. Here we find the same characters as in the large-format paintings, but without the backgrounds. The figures stand alone. Guttmann’s drawings are not merely sketches for paintings, but an independent group of works.
She herself has two lives. She has left behind her life as a tough businesswoman. And as an artist who is able to capture her inner turmoil, her fears and hopes on canvas, she lives with an intensity that is growing ever stronger. Sometimes she doesn’t leave her studio for days on end, burying herself in her work. The studio is her private sanctuary, shielding her from a world she often perceives as hostile. She has lived in two countries and under two systems, communism and capitalism, as well as in all social classes. Nowhere did she feel truly at home. This ambivalence is reflected in her paintings.
She is now sharing the results of her decades of artistic work with the public.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Friday, 27 March – Saturday, 18 April 2026
Opening hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6 p.m.
WHERE?
Miettinen Collection
Ground floor
Marburgerstraße 3
10178 Berlin
COSTS?
Free admission
