Margot Bergman: Kabinett: Art Basel Miami Beach 2022

For over six decades, Margot Bergman has operated as an independent force within the Chicago scene, working rigorously with limited feedback from the outside world. In the freedom of Bergman’s compositions, one can sense a spiritual affinity with the breakaway 20th Century European art movement COBRA, or Art Brut. Her works possess a raw unadulterated vitality, and an embrace of preconscious instinct. 

Between the mid-1990s and 2010, Bergman focused on "collaborative” works, which involved appropriating paintings that she discovered in thrift shops. Bergman found herself instinctively attracted to certain amateur paintings. They possessed an innocence, a naïveté that she, as a studied artist, could not herself claim. After amassing these works in her studio, the artist came to recognize that there was something waiting for her in each one. A new creative impulse was unlocked. Where the former author’s work ended, Bergman’s began. 

In the flower paintings on view, Bergman enhanced existing still lifes, merging her flowers and leaves with her unknown collaborators’. The resulting highly-tactile and mysterious compositions are so integrated that it is difficult for even the artist herself to identify whose marks are whose.