Whitney Biennial 2026 | Art & Artists

Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, video, music, and performance. Through self-portraiture and cinematic tableaux, she reimagines identity as both material and method. Her body becomes a site of transformation, an instrument for examining desire and belonging.

Drawing from family archives and her multicultural heritage, Gutierrez melds autobiography with artifice. Her characters occupy a wide spectrum of archetypes—mainstream and marginal, sacred and satirical—embodying the ever shifting terrain of nationality, gender, and sexuality. Moving fluidly across mediums, from billboards to episodic films, music videos, and magazines, she recontextualizes and reclaims the visual language of consumerism and mass media.

Performing every role in her productions—artist, subject, muse—Gutierrez collapses boundaries between creation and consumption. Through costume, staging, and narrative invention, she interrogates how identity is constructed and performed. Her work invites viewers to examine how images inevitably shape the selves we inhabit.