Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper

Guillermo Kuitca’s prolific career encompasses a diverse body of work and a familiar yet thought-provoking range of imagery. The paintings and works on paper in Everything inspire viewers not only to contemplate their relationship to the piece in front of them, but also their place within personal spaces and the larger world.

The exhibition begins with works from the 1980s inspired by the artist’s involvement in theater during the early part of that decade. These canvases bear titles from a vast array of sources, and their huge, cavernous interiors incorporate small figures acting out mysterious and disturbing dramas. Themes of absence and disappearance inform later paintings in this series: haunting scenes populated with overturned chairs, sullied beds that appear to be on fire, and spot-lit microphones abandoned by the speaker.

Having purged his work of figures, Kuitca’s paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s explore human interaction and migration through architectural and topographical renderings.

Working with the floor plan of a one-bedroom apartment inspired the artist to foreground other types of domestic and communal spaces—plans of public institutions in The Tablada Suite, 1991–92, geographical maps painted on canvases and mattresses from the late 1980s on, and genealogical charts in the People on Fire series, 1993. The notion of the floor plan as an objective depiction of a location or the map as a navigational tool becomes, in Kuitca’s hands, a vehicle for more poetic musing about place and non-place, memory and loss, migration and displacement.

The artist returns to the subject of theater in 1995 with the Puro Teatro series, which represents the interiors of theaters. In these paintings, architectural elevations rendered from the perspective of the stage invert the spectator-performer dynamic. Once again, an inherently objective chart becomes a powerful metaphor for individual and shared experience.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Kuitca continues to develop various series inspired by plans, maps, and public spaces. The Neufert Suite, 1999, based on the diagrams and data contained in a comprehensive architect’s handbook, eliminates all signs of architecture to focus solely on objects (office furniture, exercise equipment, peep shows, and confessional booths) presented in the format of a blueprint.

"Too much conceptual process is not interesting; the image needs poetry." - Guillermo Kuitca in conversation with Chief Curator Douglas Dreishpoon, March 2007, Buenos Aires

L’Encyclopédie series, 1999-2001, reflects Diderot’s attempt to consolidate the whole of human knowledge into a unitary volume, while the Global Order works, 2001, fuse world maps with domestic buildings to suggest that place and borders are fluid products of human invention and negotiation.

The Terminal and Trauerspiel (Tragedy) paintings, 2000-01, based on airport baggage-claim carousels, serve as metaphors for tragic journeys without end. And in the more recent Desenlace (Dénouement) paintings, 2005-07, references to art historicalsources are liberated through abstraction

The act of drawing stands out as an integral, though intermittent part of Kuitca’s creative practice, and is manifest as linear articulations on paintings, notations scrawled on sheets of paper and circular canvases that function as a tabletop in the artist’s studio, large-scale collages, and small sheets of digitally printed images soaked in water that emulate drawing through spontaneous qualities. Kuitca’s affinity for paper, particularly when seen in the context of his paintings, reveals how certain ideas are sustained, reinvented, and abstracted.

Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Guillermo Kuitca
Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008
Kurator: Douglas Dreishpoon