Audrey Guttman — Belgian conceptual artist

Born in Brussels in 1987, lives and works between Paris and Brussels.

Audrey Guttman is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist who has made the invisible her territory. Collage, cyanotype, drawing, installation, poetry: each medium becomes a means of exploring memory, desire and dream — everything that surfaces beneath waking consciousness.

Following the Surrealists in her relationship to the found object and to assemblage, she has formulated her own equation: chance + time = revelation. Trained in art history, literature and political science, Guttman weaves a constellation of references, from Belgian Surrealism to art brut, from Old Master painting to the photographic avant-gardes of the twentieth century.

Each of her solo exhibitions is a chapter in an ongoing inquiry into what makes us who we are: the masks we wear, the desires we repress, the identities we cobble together. Collages that deconstruct feminine archetypes, cyanotypes that suspend bodies in an otherworldly light, installations that give questions a place to stand in space. Everything returns to a single question: how do we step outside the frames — social, aesthetic or gendered — that confine us?

In 2024, Christie's Paris gave her carte blanche for the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto. With Images du labyrinthe: l'atelier surréaliste, she transformed the auction house into a playground: a life-size game of snakes and ladders, a fictional studio set up in homage to Breton, and everywhere the trace of a loving reading of Surrealism — that of an artist who practises it from within.

Hers is the path of an artist driven by philosophical questions and anchored in the historical avant-garde. She also publishes artist's books in which poetry and image answer one another.

Her work functions as a labyrinth without a centre: no definitive answers, only passages that open onto new enigmas.