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Indepth Arts News:
"Guillermo Kuitca: Solo Exhibition"
2005-03-23 until 2005-05-14
Hauser and Wirth London
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
Born 1961, Guillermo Kuitca is a key figure in the history of
Latin American art whose work finds inspiration in the realms
of architecture, dance, film and cartography. Hauser & Wirth
London are delighted to present this prolific Argentine artist
- who commands a strong international following - to a new
audience in the UK. A limited edition catalogue accompanies
the exhibition with texts by conductor Stephen Barlow and
editor of ‘Modern Painters’ Karen Wright.
Since the 1980s, Kuitca’s iconographic vocabulary has created
numerous powerful and distinct bodies of work. His striking
diversity of touch and potent reinventions on a panoply of
motifs, such as apartment plans, maps, conveyor belts, crown
of thorns, beds and institutional architecture ranging from
stadiums to cemeteries, have introduced unexpected variations
on these themes. Kuitca’s utilitarian imagery can be read as
‘locale’ in its most diagrammatic sense, but it is the
artist’s curious conveyance of movement in all forms, in the
home, through cities and in dreams that attempts to map
physical and mental coordinates of a lifetime. The absence of
the human figure in Kuitca’s repetoire evokes their presence
by acknowledging the confining complexities of a modern
society; reflecting on our place in a scene and on the world’s
stage.
The main gallery space features Everything, 2004, an
impressive four-panel painting which interpolates fragments of
American road maps. The enigmatic veined surface invites the
viewer for closer inspection where one can identify the names
of locations; painstakingly woven in parts. Devoid of any
beginning, end, or coordinates, places dissolve within some
larger unknown entity of no geographical order. Maps are one
of Kuitca’s leitmotifs and have played an extensive role in
his work. The graphic configurations function as his reading
of tensions between one’s assignment of place and belonging,
of home, but on the idea of the ‘place’ being Universal. Here,
the viewer traces an imaginary journey, which goes, and
returns, to nowhere. A sense of search and self-scrutiny on
the weathered surface suggests loss and dislocation.
A selection of Kuitca’s Theatre Collages (2003-2004), also
exhibited in the main gallery, are based on seating charts of
famous opera houses and theatres. Kuitca’s seating plans are
magically transformed into hovering abstracts that allude to
audiences. Incised with architectural precision, each work
retains the view from the stage, looking out to the void of an
auditorium. The treatments are different as he draws attention
to the relationship between stage and audience. Various rich
hues in Kuitca’s use of colour are seen interlapping and
seeping into each other, almost reflecting the turbulent
emotions of an audience in the grips of a performance. The
results proffer a suspended state; a captured moment. Kuitca’s
juxtaposition of private and public space is subtler in these
works as the viewer’s eye is drawn to seats that would
otherwise be occupied: individual, yet impersonal.
The Ring (2003-2004), shown in the Vault Room, is a series
based on Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle. Individually titled Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfreid and
Gotterdammerung, Kuitca has referenced album covers of
historic recordings of these operas. Formed with shredded
paper, the collages create quivers and trembles that evoke a
performance stirring within. There is here, a linking factor
to Kuitca’s theatre collage Bayreuther Festspielhaus, 2004, of
the opera house custom-built by Wagner and site of The Ring’s
epic premiere in 1876.
Guillermo Kuitca is one of Argentina’s most renowned artists.
Travelling to Europe in the 1980s, he was inspired by a
meeting with choreographer Pina Bausch and returned to Buenos
Aires to direct and design several experimental theatre
productions. In that period, the emergence of themes and
imagery seen in his work to date, began to take form in his
painting. The elemental structure of the bed, for one, a
principle site of sleep and dreams, birth and death, was used
to help create a feeling of individual isolation. He began a
series on maps and apartment plans, sometimes tinged with
religious motifs that still pervade his work in some form
today. Kuitca’s reiteration of composite layouts have
continued to emerge in his work as points of reference, often
bringing us from interiors to exteriors and creates
perspective spaces counteracted by his chosen medium. An
interest in oppositions is best seen in his bed installation
Untitled, 1992, shown at Documenta IX, where Kuitca painted
maps directly onto the bed mattresses combining themes of
sickness and death, with that of movement and life. Kuitca’s
unique work continues to marry documentary fact with an almost
surreal fantasy and reminds us, with symbols, of our
interchangeable urban anonymity.
Guillermo Kuitca has exhibited worldwide and his work is held
in major collections, including MALBA, Buenos Aires, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, The Tate Gallery, London, Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam and
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. Major
solo exhibitions include Museo National Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia, Madrid (2003), Sperone Westwater, New York (2002, 1999)
LA Louver Gallery, Venice (2002), Galerie Hauser & Wirth
Zurich (2001), Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporain,
Paris (2000), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1995), MOMA,
New York (1991) and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (1990). Group
shows include El Museo del Barrio, New York (2004), Moderna
Museet, Stockholm (1998), The Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh (1995), National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa (1994),
Documenta IX, Kassel (1992), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
(1989) and XVIII Bienal, São Paolo (1985). The artist lives
and works in Buenos Aires.
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