I write tonight out of the need to articulate ideas that have long circled in my mind about the artistic practice of a very close friend, whom I deeply admire not only for her work, but also for the conversations we have shared about the craft of modern art, painting, and what it means to pursue it from the experience of being a woman.

Margarita Gutiérrez (Bogotá, 1951) graduated from the Facultad de Bellas Artes at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1975. Her formative years were marked by an atmosphere of relative creative freedom and by the influence of teachers such as Carlos Rojas, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Hernando del Villar, Álvaro Medina, and Alfredo Guerrero. This university experience allowed her to construct a world of her own, nourished both by the intensity of her peers and by the discussions with her professors, and laid the foundations of an artistic sensitivity that has accompanied her throughout her career.

Gutiérrez understood the value of the different crafts that women artists cultivated within a modern sphere that often relegated them to the applied arts. Embroidery, ceramics, glass, textile or graphic design—practices tied to the domestic sphere and to caregiving—frequently stood in opposition to the possibility of pursuing painting or sculpture. It is no coincidence that when I saw the retrospective of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the first person I thought of was her.

Her early work, from the 1970s, explores an abstract-geometric language in series of tubes and windows close to Futurism, Art Deco, and Constructivism. In 1976 she presented Laberinto de las sombras at the Segundo Salón Atenas of the MAMBO, a work that consolidated her interest in the urban and the architectural.

Óleo sobre lino
140 X 140 cm.
2025

Oleo sobre tela
60 x 60 cm.
2024

Óleo sobre lino
25 X 25 cm.
2025

Oleo sobre tela
60 X 60 cm.
2024

Oleo sobre tela
60 x 60 cm.
2024

Óleo sobre lino
25 X 25 cm.
2025

Óleo sobre lino
140 X 140 cm.
2025

Óleo sobre tela
25 X 25 cm.
2025

Oleo sobre tela
60 x 60 cm.
2024

Óleo sobre lino
25 X 25 cm.
2025

Lápices de color sobre papel
15.2 X 20.3
2024

Lápices de color sobre papel
15.2 X 20.3
2024

Poco después trabajó como asistente de Manuel Hernández, con quien colaboró en el mural del Congreso Nacional en Bogotá, experiencia que derivó en una etapa de geometría pura, marcada por triángulos, equilibrios compositivos y colores planos que remiten a Mondrian y la Bauhaus. Durante estos años también fue asistente de la Revista Arte en Colombia, acercándose al circuito crítico e intelectual del país.
A lo largo de los ochenta, Gutiérrez profundizó en la abstracción geométrica y en un uso cada vez más arriesgado del color. Poco a poco, las estructuras rígidas dieron paso a curvas y formas biomorfas inspiradas en la naturaleza: jardines, hojas, flores y semillas que fue sintetizando en composiciones de gran equilibrio. En este tránsito se pueden reconocer ecos de Mondrian, Miró, Calder o Arp, aunque siempre reelaborados desde una voz personal y con una sensibilidad marcada por lo femenino./

Su interés por los movimientos modernos —del Arts and Crafts al De Stijl— se refleja tanto en su investigación como en su vida cotidiana. En esta genealogía resulta significativo recordar a Margaret MacKintosh, compañera de Charles Rennie MacKintosh, cuya labor en la fundación del Arts and Crafts junto a William Morris fue clave pero históricamente invisibilizada. No es casual que Margarita viva rodeada de objetos que hacen eco de esa tradición: vajillas art déco, floreros art nouveau y mobiliario moderno. En los noventa, la exposición Cincuentas integró pintura, cerámica y tapices junto a piezas de diseño curvilíneo, en un gesto que unía arte y vida cotidiana y reafirmaba la vigencia de aquellas herencias modernas.

Shortly afterward, she worked as an assistant to Manuel Hernández, with whom she collaborated on the mural for the National Congress in Bogotá—an experience that led to a phase of pure geometry, marked by triangles, compositional balances, and flat colors that recall Mondrian and the Bauhaus. During these years, she also served as an assistant at the magazine Arte en Colombia, engaging closely with the country’s critical and intellectual circuit.

Throughout the 1980s, Gutiérrez deepened her exploration of geometric abstraction and an increasingly bold use of color. Gradually, rigid structures gave way to curves and biomorphic forms inspired by nature: gardens, leaves, flowers, and seeds that she synthesized into compositions of great balance. In this transition one can recognize echoes of Mondrian, Miró, Calder, or Arp, though always reworked through her own voice and with a sensibility marked by the feminine.

Her interest in modern movements, from Arts and Crafts to De Stijl, appears both in her research and in her daily life. Within this genealogy it is significant to recall Margaret MacKintosh, partner of Charles Rennie MacKintosh, whose contribution to the founding of the Arts and Crafts movement alongside William Morris was crucial yet historically obscured. It is no accident that Margarita lives surrounded by objects that echo this tradition: Art Deco tableware, Art Nouveau vases, and modern furniture. In the 1990s, the exhibition Cincuentas integrated painting, ceramics, and tapestries alongside curvilinear design pieces, in a gesture that united art and daily life and reaffirmed the relevance of these modern inheritances.

The feminine appears in her work not only in the choice of natural motifs, but also in her way of conceiving painting: ordered, close to the real, open to the discourse of love and to the seed as a vital metaphor. Her biomorphic curves resonate with the softness of Georgia O’Keeffe, the chromatic transparency of Helen Frankenthaler, and, in contrast, with the geometric solidity of Fanny Sanín, whom she admires deeply. The work of Rosa Sanín also reverberates in this organic, gentle search that evokes the feminine through painting.

Thinking about Margarita also brings to mind modern artists such as Sonia Delaunay, whose synthesis of Cubist forms opened paths toward lyrical abstraction; or the Colombians Judith Márquez and Cecilia Porras, who turned the object into a pretext for redefining landscape through planes, geometric forms, and new visual structures.
By the 2000s, her attention shifted toward the garden as a space of contemplation.

Between the private and the universal, her paintings of leaves and flowers were born from the patient observation of her own garden and the botanical gardens she visits during her travels. In a world dominated by immediacy, Margarita finds in these organic forms a slow rhythm, conducive to contemplation and creation. From there, she also turned to seascapes, initially inspired by Milton Avery, whom she reinterprets through her own sensibility.

In her most recent production, Gutiérrez continues to trace a bridge between geometry and nature. Her compositions reveal an impeccable mastery of form and color inspired by the pictorial synthesis of Ellsworth Kelly, while also manifesting her own experience of inhabiting nature, whether in the intimacy of the garden or in the vastness of the landscape.
With more than five decades of trajectory, Margarita Gutiérrez has moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration, always exploring the relationship between design, painting, and nature. A student of Momo del Villar and Ana Mercedes Hoyos, she inherited from both the interest in reinterpreting landscape through modern codes. From Marco Ospina she takes the Cubist synthesis of landscape, while from Hoyos she draws the gesture of looking at the city and Bogotá’s hills through the window as a pictorial motif.

Mujer Montaña acknowledges Margarita Gutiérrez as a fundamental presence in the history of modern Colombian art: an artist who, through painting, has interlaced tradition and modernity, geometry and botany, design and synthesis. The exhibition restores her rightful place in history and projects it into the present, as part of a broader effort to reinstate the presence of women in Colombian painting and affirm their contemporary relevance, understanding that to reconstruct landscape also means to look at it through feminine sensibility.

Margarita Gutiérrez (Bogotá, 1951) has been a singular figure in abstract painting in Colombia. Her career took off in the 1970s, when she exhibited extensively and received distinctions such as the Primer Premio de Pintura at the VII Salón de Arte Joven del Museo de Zea, the Gran Premio Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo at the Musée National de Mónaco, and she also participated in the II Salón Atenas at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. Her work dialogues with national references such as Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Manuel Hernández, Momo (Hernando) del Villar, and Marco Ospina, as well as international figures like Hilma Af Klint, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Milton Avery, whose explorations of visual synthesis deeply resonate with her practice.

She took part in exhibitions such as the II Bienal de Arte de Bogotá (1990), the Primera Bienal de Pintura del Caribe y Centroamérica (1992), and Colombia en portada at Casa de América, Madrid (1994). Marta Traba included her among the Novísimos Colombianos, Germán Rubiano highlighted her ability to combine geometry with chromatic sensuality, and Eduardo Serrano emphasized the coherence and evolution of her formal explorations.

Her works are part of collections including the Banco de la República, the MAMBO, and the Museo de Arte of the Universidad Nacional.

As has happened to many women artists after motherhood, the rhythms of life associated with family care—historically invisible and feminized labors—reduced her visibility in the sector. Nevertheless, over five decades, Margarita has developed a pictorial language of her own, characterized by chromatic rigor, processes of abstraction, and a sensitivity nurtured by gardening and situated contemplation.

Mujer Montaña brings together her most recent processes, in which she summons the mountains surrounding Bogotá and the region’s flora. Undulating forms, hills outlined as essential curves, and bodies of water evoke the vitality of constant transformation. Some paintings incorporate variations of scale and color as an invitation to contemplation and to embrace that which might otherwise go unnoticed. They also function as sensitive cartographies that warn of the monumentality and vulnerability of the territory, revealing constant tensions in her practice: the encounter between order and play, structure and movement, rigor and sensitivity.

Two series of drawings reveal her intimate, unpublished process. The first documents flowers she cultivated herself and those observed during walks through the Bogotá Botanical Garden.

In the background, she traces a mountainous horizon as a guiding thread, weaving connections between gardens and the mountain range. The second series is inspired by the páramos that surround Bogotá—high mountain ecosystems indispensable to both urban and rural life, which were affected by the 2024 forest fires. Here, the artist evokes, through her palette of ochres, grays, and violets, the mineral richness of the páramo and the devastating traces of fire.

Both universes—gardens and mountains—converge in the exhibition as metaphors for life and for Margarita’s creative processes: practices that require care, time, and perseverance, offering images of resistance against the vertigo of immediacy. One question resonates throughout: how do we connect with and transform ourselves in relation to the world we inhabit? From a contemporary perspective of affective ecologies, the key lies in interdependence: no being exists in isolation. The affective is what sustains life in common. Far from being mere landscapes, the mountains are living organisms that welcome us and activate shared bonds and intuitions. Plants emerge not as ornaments of domesticated gardens, but as territories of intimacy and memory that condense the interweaving of the urban and the vegetal.

Mujer Montaña thus acts as a threshold between the personal and the collective, between the recognition of her own body as a powerful mountain and the appropriation of that which we hold in common.

Laura Zarta Gutiérrez