ART-PRESENTATION: Guillermo Kuitca

Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he still lives, Guillermo Kuitca has been developing a set of recurrent themes since the 80’s. Ranging from stages in theatres to familiar objects, along with apartment floor plans, city maps, and concert halls—these themes constitute the main elements of a personal world in which different levels of reality interlock and compose an improbable geography.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

Guillermo Kuitca presents new and recent works in his solo exhibition, the presentation is divided into three distinct bodies of works: paintings from “The Family Idiot” series first exhibited in Los Angeles in 2019, new works including Kuitca’s “House Plan” series made during the 2020 lockdown in Buenos Aires, and the artist’s ongoing “Theatre series”. Since representing Argentina in the 2007 Venice Biennale, the artist has engaged in a unique cubistoid style, merging the Cubist tendencies of Picasso and Braque with his own abstract vocabulary. While this style has dominated Kuitca’s practice over the past decade, the new works on view at Hauser & Wirth weave fresh elements of figuration into his preferred themes of domestic and communal spaces, which hold renewed meaning in the context of the pandemic. The works in the exhibition masterfully evoke feelings of isolation and detachment through this distinctive melding of figuration and abstraction and the artist’s conceptual treatment of space. The first section of the exhibition presents “The Family Idiot”, a series of paintings and triptychs picturing imaginary rooms. Drawing from Jean-Paul Sartre’s three-volume study of Gustave Flaubert, the series expands the novel’s core existential question: ‘What at this point in time can we know about a man?’. Kuitca’s paintings collapse, mirror, and fracture the architectural structures they depict, placing the viewer in spatial and temporal limbo. Although seemingly empty, they do employ a recurring set of motifs from the artist’s career, drawing the viewer’s eye closer to the canvas. Beds often serve as a sort of stage, suggesting notions of family and the domestic sphere, as seen in “The Family Idiot (Sleeper in the mirror)” (2019), empty chairs provide a distinct feeling of alienation and disintegration in “The Family Idiot” (2018), and the appearance of mirrored walls confound distinctions between proximity and distance. The works, disorientating and dark, disrupt the viewer’s sense of certainty and in turn, the temptation to take for granted what is real in the world around us. New paintings and works on paper occupy the main exhibition space, including Kuitca’s “House Plan” series. These new works examine the artist’s prevailing interest in blueprints and floorplans of domestic buildings, as seen in his mixed media work “House plans (24 parts)” (2020). Despite working with this subject since the1980s, these floor plans resonate on a deeper level today: at the time of making these paintings and drawings, Kuitca was locked down in his home in Buenos Aires. Observing that ‘diagrams are neither abstraction nor successful representation,’ Kuitca employs them to evoke both spatial and psychological experience during a period of isolation. In a number of new paintings, Kuitca layers dramatic landscapes under the floorplans in a bid to bridge two and three-dimensional realms of experience. The exhibition so includes a selection of works from Kuitca’s “Theatre series” that build upon his long-standing involvement with the dramatic arts through an idiosyncratic integration of architectural features in two-dimensional space. The intimately scaled mixed media works on view draw upon seating maps from theaters around the world, such as the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Teatro Real and the Mariinsky Theatre. By modifying found diagrams, Kuitca highlights the universality of illustrative signifiers while undermining their legibility through mixed media. With theaters and opera houses having been closed around the world, Kuitca has thought about the significance of intermissions in these dramatic spaces in relation to the pandemic.

Photo: Guillermo Kuitca, Untitled (Teatro Real), 2013-2015, Oil on canvas, 195 x 249 x 3 cm / 76 3/4 x 98 x 1 1/8 in, © Guillermo Kuitca, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Switzerland, Duration: 11/6-27/8/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.hauserwirth.com