Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
November 18, 2021 – January 29, 2022
Martine Gutierrez
Neo-Indeo, Cakchi Lana Caliente, p29 from Indigenous Woman, 2018
© Martine Gutierrez, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery
Fraenkel Gallery presents Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed, a new exhibition of photographs. Acting as both subject and producer, Martine Gutierrez explores the multiplicity and complexity of identity in a series of pop-influenced narrative scenes. The exhibition, which takes its name from Cher’s 1973 album, includes selections from three recent series, Body En Thrall, Plastics, and Indigenous Woman, the 124-page magazine for which Martine Gutierrez acted as muse, model, photographer, and art director, creating every element from fashion spreads and ads to an editor’s letter. A Berkeley native now based in Brooklyn, this is the artist’s inaugural show with Fraenkel Gallery.
Indigenous Woman presents images in the glossy, seductive style of fashion and advertising photography, reimagining the tropes of those genres with wit and nuance. In the project, which was shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Martine Gutierrez carves out a place for herself, trying on fluid identities that touch on race, class, gender, and sexuality. As she has noted, “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.” The exhibition includes selections from Neo-Indeo, a fashion editorial in which Martine Gutierrez wears Indigenous textiles, some of which belonged to her Mayan grandparents, paired with vintage and designer items in a personal, multicultural version of high fashion. In a 1960s-inspired ad, Identity Boots, Martine Gutierrez poses nude except for shiny white go-go boots and brightly colored gender symbols and glyphs, crudely taped to her skin. In a series of portraits titled Demons, Martine Gutierrez transforms herself into mythical women from ancient and indigenous cultures, adorned with sculptural hairstyles and extravagant jewelry. Together, the pages of Indigenous Woman present what Martine Gutierrez has called a celebration of “ever-evolving self-image.”
In the series Body En Thrall, begun as an editorial for Indigenous Woman, the artist stages photographs using herself as a model, posing with mannequins in charged scenarios. In the selection on view, Martine Gutierrez appears in the guise of a blonde persona she has referred to as “the bombshell,” and pictures provocative scenes that navigate questions about power, desire, and self-objectification.
In Plastics, Martine Gutierrez pulls plastic wrap tightly over her face while wearing messy blonde wigs and contact lenses, holding her breath as she embodies a series of archetypes. The transparent film pushes her features and smears her makeup, creating portraits that speak to the violence and artifice inherent in mainstream ideals of beauty.
MARTINE GUTIERREZ (b. 1989) was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to produce ANTI-ICON, a series of photographs installed on bus shelters throughout New York, Chicago, and Boston, on view until November 21, 2021. In 2023, her work will be included in Musical Thinking: New Video Artists in the Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection in Washington, D.C. Her work has been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography, Darlinghurst, New South Wales; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, TX; Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, among others.
FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
