Margaretha Gubernale


Margaretha Gubernale was born on June 9, 1941, in Zug, Switzerland, the eldest of three siblings. Even as a little girl, she would draw with paper and pencil what her father, a master baker and confectioner, decorated on cakes for his customers. In Zug, she attended the Maria Opferung convent school and the local secondary school, and then the cantonal school on Hofstrasse, from which she graduated with a federal commercial diploma. She wanted to go to the conservatory because she had learned to play the church organ at an early age, but her father didn't want his daughter to become an artist without a future. So Margaretha helped her parents with the business. Sometimes she would send her parents to the mountains on certain weekends and run the bakery all by herself. She loved painting posters and decorating the shop window. During this time, she idolized Michelangelo's powerful bodies and the dramatic paintings of Delacroix, whose prints she stuck to her ceiling. She took a literature course at the Academic Community in Zurich, read many classics, and met her husband, Calogero Gubernale, a helmsman and prospective captain of the count's navigation school in Catania from Rosolini in the province of Syracuse. She married and had two children, Mario and Helena. During the first seven years of their marriage, she worked as a clerk for National Councilor Alois Hürlimann and his legal secretary, Hans Windlin, while they drafted a new building code and organized the most important national road into Ticino. Margaretha then took over the housework and business operations for her parents, who moved to Vitznau, as her father was 20 years older than her mother. During this time, Margaretha became fascinated by the surrealism of Salvador Dali and the passionate art of Oslo's Edward Munch. She opened a small gallery where she exhibited her own works and other artists, which was met with disapproval from the envious, and she was vilified in the newspapers. She closed her gallery, and so her odyssey abroad began in 1983, with an exhibition at the Electoral Palace in Mainz and a gold medal from the Baden-Baden Art Circle in Germany, for which she used the money sponsored by her grandmother for her paintings.

Even in her early works, Margaretha Gubernale sought a way to reach everyone in the world with her thoughts, which she only achieved through figurative representation. Through abstract painting, Christ and Salami appeared in one image and merely confirmed the viewer's world of thought. Her painting could not be limited to figurative painting, but she also wanted to be as free as abstract painting. She also considered the surreal style, but while this went far in the direction she wanted to lead people in, it did not quite reach it. So she sought a solution, which she found in symbolism. Here she can present her thoughts figuratively and metaphysically expand this form beyond itself in a parable, thus breaking down all narrative boundaries, weaving in abstract and surrealistic elements and reaching the soul of every thinking person with the help of color and form, provided that they are of good will to connect the earth with the spiritual heaven and give priority to ethics. She learns a great deal from nature and senses the divine within it, which inspires her. She prefers the color blue as a spiritual color and often explores philosophical and magical themes. For her, blue represents air as the spur of fire and has three states of matter: dry, rainy, and icy, and expands as a continuation of light.

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