Tobias gutmann

About the artist

Tobias Gutmann (b. 1987, Wewak, Papua New Guinea) works with drawing, performance and installation. At the centre of his practice is the portrait: a few lines, a few fields of colour, drawn in minutes in front of the sitter.

Since 2012 he has portrayed more than 5,000 people in his Face-o-mat, an analogue portrait booth he has taken from Stockholm around the world. What the sitter takes home is a reading rather than a likeness — what Gutmann calls the sound of a person. Since 2019 a second draughtsman has been at work: Sai Bot, an AI developed with the studio Dazlus and trained exclusively on Gutmann’s own portraits. It draws in his line and speaks with his voice, and it only improves as long as the artist keeps drawing.

His work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Kunsthalle Bern, Platform L in Seoul and Art Central in Hong Kong, with solo exhibitions at Die Mobiliar, Bern, and Underdogs Gallery, Lisbon. He holds an MFA from Konstfack, Stockholm, and an MFA from Zurich University of the Arts.

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Institutional exhibitions

Gutmann’s work is presented in museum and institutional contexts where the encounter itself is part of the exhibition — the artist drawing live, or his machine drawing in his absence.

KÜNSTLICHE KREATIVITÄT

Hand and machine, side by side — Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, 2026

Künstliche Kreativität examines artificial intelligence as a creative medium in contemporary art. Produced by Aargauer Kunsthaus in cooperation with HEK Basel, it brings together Alfatih, Niculin Barandun, Botto, Terence Broad, Esther Hunziker, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Simone C Niquille and others. It is on view from 26 September 2026 to 10 January 2027.

Gutmann is represented with Sai Bot, large drawings on paper, painted cardboard figures and the albums of the Face-o-mat. Visitors sit down in front of the machine, are looked at, and take a portrait home. On 14 and 15 November 2026, 12.30 to 17.00, the artist draws live in the Face-o-mat, in the same room as his twin.

Foto Credit: © David Aebi, Burgdorf

FACE-O-MAT ATELIER

Face-o-mat Atelier was Tobias Gutmann’s solo presentation at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, Ithra, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in early 2024. It opened within Ithra’s Learning Beyond programme with a three-day live performance: Gutmann drawing visitors in a site-specific installation built from cardboard, one sitter at a time, a few minutes each.

The performance then became an atelier that stayed open for two months. Visitors could sit for a portrait, but they could also take the other chair and draw each other in the Face-o-mat manner. An online archive collected the drawings and showed how the visitors saw one another. For a practice built on the encounter between two people, it was the first time the artist handed the frame over to the public.

The albums labelled Riyadh 2024 and Dhahran 2024 on the shelf in Aarau hold the portraits from these months.

Foto Credit: ©

FACE-O-MAT WITH SAI BOT

The artist and his twin, drawing in parallel — Misk Art Institute, Riyadh, 2024

At Misk Art Institute in Riyadh, Gutmann showed the Face-o-mat alongside Sai Bot [PLATZHALTER: Programm/Anlass, Daten]. Visitors could sit for the artist and for the machine and compare two portraits of the same face: one drawn by hand in a few strokes, the other by an AI trained on more than a decade of those strokes. [PLATZHALTER: ein Satz zur Resonanz oder zur Zahl der Porträts, falls Tobias sie hat.]

Foto Credit: ©

TOBIAS GUTMANN & SAI BOT

A machine learns a hand — Die Mobiliar Art Collection,
Bern, 2022–2023

Tobias Gutmann & Sai Bot was the first large presentation of the artist and his AI twin, shown as a room-filling installation in the entrance hall of Die Mobiliar in Bern from 29 November 2022 to 17 March 2023. Walls in pastel shades and dark green evoked the digital «cloud» Sai Bot is said to live in. At the centre stood the machine itself, developed with the studio Dazlus since 2019 and trained on Gutmann’s Face-o-mat portraits.

Sai Bot’s framed portraits hung among works from the Mobiliar collection, portraits by other hands and other decades, so that visitors read the machine’s drawings as part of a longer history of the genre. Works by Gutmann and Sai Bot have since entered the collection.

Foto Credit: ©

Glasstress 8½

Glasstress 8½, Collateral Event of the 60th Biennale di Venezia — Fondazione Berengo, Murano, 2024

Glasstress 8½ marked Simon Berger's second invitation to the exhibition series initiated by Adriano Berengo, patron of contemporary glass art — at the Fondazione Berengo on Murano, from April to November 2024, an official Collateral Event of the 60th Biennale di Venezia.

Since its first edition in 2009, Glasstress has brought together leading contemporary artists who work with glass in new ways, each edition timed to the Venice Biennale — among the most important platforms for contemporary glass art worldwide. Berger presented new works continuing his figurative exploration of the material: images formed through controlled impact.

The invitation continued a relationship that began in 2022, when his contribution to Glasstress — State of Mind became a defining moment in his career, and deepened when Fondazione Berengo commissioned works for Shattering Beauty, his solo exhibition at the Museo del Vetro. Few places recur in Berger's path the way Murano does.