Margaretha Gubernale — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

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The Celestial Narratives of Margaretha Gubernale

In the ever-shifting landscape of contemporary art, where abstraction often claims the highest throne and figuration is left to negotiate its survival in contested territories, Margaretha Gubernale has pursued, with unwavering determination, an artistic vision that resists compromise. Born in Zug, Switzerland, in 1941, Gubernale has forged a path that not only defends the figurative imagination but also elevates it into a symbolic-narrative cosmology of extraordinary depth. Her paintings oil on canvas, carefully crafted with luminous fields of blue and intricate figural arrangements stage a theatre of metaphysical inquiry.

Her motto, “Just as in a good story, readers have space to create their image,” encapsulates her gift: to invite participation, to awaken the viewer into interpretive freedom, while never relinquishing the guiding hand of composition. In doing so, Gubernale belongs in a lineage of artists whose works oscillate between allegory and parable—one thinks of William Blake, who dared to hold myth and politics in a single frame, or of Max Ernst, who twisted Surrealism toward the poetic. Yet Gubernale’s project is singular. She has not merely contributed to a style; she has created one.

Her career, by her own account, began in resistance. In 1984, at the KUNSTKREIS-BADEN-BADEN exhibition in Mainz, under the patronage of Helmut Kohl, Gubernale exhibited abroad for the first time. The reception was charged with controversy: publicly attacked for her fidelity to figuration in an era dominated by abstraction, she nonetheless received a gold medal. That moment, a paradox of rejection and recognition, ignited her artistic momentum. From then, she would become both an artist and, in a sense, a cultural dissident one who affirmed the necessity of narrative and symbolism when others abandoned them.

Subsequent milestones the gold medal at the Olympic Fine Art 2008 exhibition in Beijing, the first prize at Spoleto Arte’s Margherita Hack competition in 2016, exhibitions at the Grand Palais in Paris, Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, New York’s Agora and Broadway Galleries, and beyond attest to her resilience and to the broad resonance of her art. Her career reads like the itinerary of a restless visionary: moving between Switzerland, Italy, France, China, and the United States, she has offered her vision to international publics, often against prevailing fashions, but always with the conviction that her symbolic parables matter.

The paintings themselves are built, as she insists, like architecture. Each figure, each symbol, each glimmering orb has its place. Her favored chromatic field the many shades of blue serves as both atmosphere and philosophical proposition. Blue is, for her, not simply a color but a condition: of clarity, of spirit, of transcendence. In this sense, her paintings are not merely narrative illustrations but metaphysical architectures, scaffolding our capacity to think the unthinkable.

Let us move through the works themselves, for each canvas is a chapter in the unfolding scripture of her career.

Declaration Day of the Angular Moon (2025)

This canvas crystallizes her symbolic-narrative ethos. A woman, standing precariously on ascending blocks, chisels away at a massive, planetary form. Attached to her waist is a cord leading to Earth, tethering her labor to origins. Below, an oil pump extracts resources; above, a pot carries the “last broken ear of Earth as a souvenir.” Around her orbit planets in primary colors, marking the destruction of cosmic harmony.

This is allegory at its sharpest: ethics, exploitation, and the question of AI are woven into a single constellation. The woman’s labor is at once creative and destructive. She is Prometheus and Cassandra, sculptor and prophet. Here, Gubernale asserts her central theme—that art, like life, is the site where balance may be lost, but also where meaning can be redeemed.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Here, the stage is set with a cow, a fire, women in ritual gestures, a candle, a piano, and symbols of calculation inscribed upon black cloth. The title invokes Goethe’s famous tale, and indeed, the scene unfolds as a cautionary allegory of uncontrolled forces. The women appear possessed, their gestures both ecstatic and anguished.

Yet, what is striking is Gubernale’s refusal of caricature. Her apprentice is not a figure of ridicule but of pathos. The painting vibrates with music she herself plays the organ, and here, the piano becomes emblem of both harmony and hubris. The moral parable is unmistakable: the unleashing of forces, technological or spiritual, must be accompanied by wisdom.

Fausta Thinks Humility (2019)

This painting quiets the tumult. Two women one contemplative, one actively engaged are staged among books, under the watch of a serene moon. The books pile up like sacred monuments. One woman presents a volume with a radioactive emblem, an unmistakable critique of knowledge’s ambivalence.

Here, Gubernale demonstrates her capacity for nuance. Humility, as the title suggests, is not passivity but ethical vigilance. Knowledge without humility becomes destructive; knowledge with humility becomes light.

The Spiral of Backward- and Forwardspeed (2016)

A woman seated on a rock, framed by stars and celestial spirals, raises her arms to the heavens. Around her swirl dynamic ribbons of energy. The title itself both poetic and technical captures the paradox of time. To move forward, one must reckon with backward spirals.

This work exemplifies Gubernale’s love of cosmological allegory. It belongs to a tradition stretching back to Hildegard von Bingen, whose illuminations combined mystical visions with intricate diagrams. Gubernale, too, produces visual theologies for a secular age.

The Dance for a Subscription (2024)

On this canvas, Gubernale stages contemporary life: a woman in yellow resists the entreaties of men offering subscriptions, their papers scattering at her feet. The work is playful yet profound. The gestures of refusal and negotiation dramatize the tension between autonomy and consumption.

This is where Gubernale’s symbolic-narrative style proves its relevance to modern society. Her works are not retreats into timeless myth but engagements with the present: the commodification of life, the pressures of conformity, the quiet dignity of resistance.

The Widening (2021)

Here, a woman robed in white stands among trees, her hands extended as if in blessing. Chains resembling DNA strands stretch between trunks, aflame at one end. A bird rests at her feet.

This work stages the bioethical frontier. Nature, genetics, spirituality they converge in a vision at once serene and urgent. The widening gap, perhaps between technological mastery and natural harmony, is dramatized as both danger and possibility.

The Tank (2020)

One of Gubernale’s most searing works. Two women in blue dresses sit in a circle of light, one presenting the other with a grenade. In the background, a tank emerges from the forest, its violence barely restrained.

Here, Gubernale fuses tenderness and terror. The intimacy of the women contrasts with the machinery of war. The numbers inscribed on the grenade suggest both digital coding and the fatal countdown. In this painting, she confronts war not abstractly but with harrowing intimacy. It recalls Picasso’s Guernica, but without its monochrome despair here, blue insists upon dignity even amid catastrophe.

Three Graces on Lake Zug (2023)

Three women sit on rocks by the water, absorbed in their smartphones. Their dresses echo the palette of classical statuary, yet their gestures belong to our digital age.

The irony is gentle but profound. Gubernale does not mock but observes: the eternal motif of beauty and grace now refracted through devices. It is a commentary on attention, on how connection and isolation intertwine. The lake her native Zug anchors the work in personal geography, fusing myth with autobiography.

To Set a Goal (2018)

Four figures kneel around a rectangular pool that contains not water but stars, galaxies, and the moon. They measure, calculate, photograph. Bottles and debris linger on the margins.

The allegory is unmistakable: humanity approaches the cosmos with tools, instruments, and technologies, forgetting reverence. Yet, as always, Gubernale allows ambiguity. The pool of stars is not desecrated but studied, suggesting the double-edged nature of scientific pursuit.

Holy Forest with Yggdrasil (2014)

Here, Gubernale draws upon Norse mythology. A woman in white stands among tall trees, raising her arms to the World Tree. DNA strands entwine with branches, suggesting the interconnection of myth and biology. Birds, plants, and the moon complete the sacred ecology.

This is among her most lyrical works. It reveals her love of the forest, not merely as motif but as source of strength and inspiration. The painting recalls the visionary landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, yet is distinctly her own, saturated with scientific and spiritual symbolism.

Moonlit Cascade (2022) [from uploaded set]

In this late work, a woman gestures toward a waterfall under a luminous moon. DNA strands and spectral animals populate the scene. The painting stages the eternal cycle of water, life, and renewal, situating humanity within cosmic ecology.

Here, Gubernale’s symbolic-narrative style reaches its most serene register. The painting does not admonish but consoles.

It is telling that one admirer once called her a “martyr of art.” Indeed, her path has not been easy. She has endured gossip, dismissal, misunderstanding. Yet, like Giordano Bruno, who was burned for articulating a cosmos without center, Gubernale has persisted in the face of hostility. That she has emerged with international recognition, streamed in Times Square, honored in Beijing and Paris, published in Future of Art, is testimony not only to her resilience but to the necessity of her vision.

Her art is important for society precisely because it resists simplification. It confronts war, technology, consumerism, and ecology, not with propaganda but with parables. It teaches us that ethics, humility, and beauty are inseparable. In this, her place in the art scene is both central and prophetic. She stands as one of the few artists to have developed a truly personal style, one that merges figuration and abstraction, science and myth, critique and consolation.

If one were to compare her to a notable figure of the past, it would be Hildegard von Bingen, the medieval abbess who combined music, vision, and cosmology into luminous manuscripts. Like Hildegard, Gubernale is composer as well as painter, organist as well as visionary. Both women embody the rare synthesis of art and philosophy, faith and inquiry.

Gubernale continues to create with unflagging vitality, her vision expanding ceaselessly into new symbolic constellations. Her works, luminous in their blues, daring in their symbolism, remind us that art is not entertainment but necessity. Her canvases are places where philosophy becomes visible, where history confronts myth, where society is shown its mirror and its possibility.

We live in an age of fragmentation, where meaning seems perpetually deferred. Gubernale refuses that deferral. She insists that art can still articulate parables, that images can still teach, that beauty can still redeem. For this reason, her contribution to contemporary art is not peripheral but essential.

Margaretha Gubernale is not simply an artist of Switzerland, nor merely of Europe. She is a global voice, a modern visionary, a creator of symbolic architectures for the 21st century. To encounter her canvases is to be reminded that art, at its highest calling, offers not escape but illumination.

Her body of work testifies to the enduring power of imagination against conformity, of beauty against despair. She demonstrates that art can be rigorous yet tender, symbolic yet accessible, visionary yet anchored in lived human experience. In this sense, Gubernale’s practice embodies not just artistic achievement but a cultural necessity. She reminds us that images, when shaped with integrity and courage, can offer society its deepest mirror and its most radiant horizon.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine