Margot Bergman

In cooperation with Urbane Künste Ruhr and the Museum Folkwang Essen, the Museum Langmatt is holding the first European solo exhibition of the work of the American artist Margot Bergman (*1934 in Chicago). This exhibition offers a condensed display of her remarkable artwork, created over the past 15 years. Visitors will discover a great artist who created a brilliant body of late artworks.

The small-format portraits that Margot Bergman has been creating since the mid-1990s oscillate between surreal metamorphosis and Art Brut. The artist finds landscape pictures by unknown artists at flea markets. In these pictures, she discovers latent faces, which she causes to emerge out of the natural scenery by means of partial overpainting. The melancholy expression of such a face often has a touch of humor shining through, freeing the depicted person from their despondent mood through playfulness. A delight in carefree fantasizing and invention is a thread running through the work of Margot Bergman. No matter how small their format, her images have a magical power that is infectious. The portraits that she has painted in recent years dispense with overpainting. They show fictional persons upon whom life has left many marks. In spite of the unlovely distortions of their facial features, the people in these portraits radiate an impressively serene quality, and a childlike, untroubled cheerfulness.

The exhibition will be on display in an altered form, under the titel Margot Bergman. Inner and Outer Landscape, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen from the 4th of May to the 30th of June 2019. Publication with texts by Britta Peters (the artistic director of Urbane Künste Ruhr), Markus Stegmann (the director of Museum Langmatt) and John Yau (art critic and lyricist, New York), 80 pages, Ger./Eng., hardcover, CHF 28.00 / 20.00. Available in our shop.

Image: Exhibition view Margot Bergman