Guillermo Kuitca

This summer, the celebrated Argentine artist returns to Hauser & Wirth Zürich with an exhibition of new and recent work exploring these long-standing motifs. Exhibited across the ground floor of the gallery, 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. The exhibition opens during Zurich Art Weekend’s June edition, and coincides with two major museum presentations: Kuitca’s curated exhibition of the Fondation Cartier’s collection at the Triennale di Milano, and ‘Guillermo Kuitca – Dénouement’ at Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, the first exhibition devoted to the artist in France for more than twenty years.

The first section of the exhibition in Zurich 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.

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 plan (24 parts)’ (2020). Despite working with this subject since the 1980s, 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.

The exhibition will also include 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 theatres around the world, such as the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, Teatro Real and the Mariinsky Theatre.