Guillermo Kuitca

1 June - 28 July 2012

London

For the past two years, Argentinean artist Guillermo Kuitca has created an extensive body of large-scale paintings and meticulously detailed graphite works, which is presented for the first time at Hauser & Wirth's Savile Row gallery. Shifting from gestural mark-making to acute linear precision and incorporating diverse motifs central to Kuitca's practice – fragmented cartographies and architectural plans – the works explore many different histories, all linked together by Kuitca's unique painterly language. Kuitca's expansive canvases dominate the North Gallery and immerse their viewer in what Robert Storr describes as the artist's on-going exploration of the 'monuments of modernism'. His dense paintings are covered edge to edge with dynamic slashes, creating a rhythmic, almost primal sense of urgency. Travelling across these mountainous, yet two-dimensional surfaces, set against a pallid grey background or even coursing over an unprimed canvas are brightly coloured cartographic lines. However, these guiding marks contradict their initial purpose; Kuitca has removed all city names and highway numbers and assembled elements from many different maps, presenting a maelstrom of dislocated information. These paintings push Kuitca's earlier cartographic pieces to the brink of total abstraction and delve deeper into the resistance and collision of his angular terrain with the fluid movement of the painterly map lines. In the South Gallery, shown alongside smaller canvases and experimental, intimate vignettes painted over wooden panels, Kuitca presents a suite of seven large-scale, graphite works. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Denis Diderot, with Jean le Rond d'Alembert and other scholars, undertook the collective, yet ill-fated task of compiling all knowledge into numerous volumes: the 'Encyclopédie'. Kuitca takes marble floorplans from the 'Encyclopédie', manipulates these architectural plates, then painstakingly transposes each minute detail, replicating migrant splinters of information with an incomparable attention to detail. Kuitca once said, 'I am interested in the major contradiction between a medium…which is so specific and partial, and the abyss of an enormous knowledge of things'. Kuitca's manipulated plans straddle the boundary between ancient and futuristic. While the massive scale and intricacy pays homage to the demands of such a task, Kuitca sees in this suite an acknowledgement that technology is now bringing us closer to reaching Diderot's originally unattainable goal. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication which catalogues Kuitca's entire new body of work. The publication features an introduction by Philip Larratt-Smith and a newly commissioned translation of Vivant Denon's novella, 'No Tomorrow', originally published in 1777.

Installation views

About the Artist

Guillermo Kuitca

Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca draws on a range of iconography, including architectural plans, maps, theaters, musical scores and domestic spaces to produce an oeuvre that explores themes of history, memory, structured absence, sound and silence and the tension between the empirical and abstract. Shifting from gestural mark-making to linear precision, Kuitca’s work mines varied aesthetic styles and histories, and in the latter half of his career, he has achieved significant acclaim for his deployment of a unique cubistoid style that masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration.

Exhibiting his first paintings at the age of thirteen at Lirolay Gallery in Buenos Aires, Kuitca quickly expanded his artistic practice by also studying drawing and theater direction. Early paintings from the 1980s incorporated theater imagery, informed by his experience in theater production and often explored themes of history, memory, migration, and domestic and communal spaces, before Kuitca later began to integrate architectural and cartographic subjects into his oeuvre. Having established himself as a leading figure in Buenos Aires’s art scene, in 1991—the same year that he founded his studio program in the city for residencies and young artists called Beca Kuitca—he staged his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A year later, he achieved further renown with his participation in documenta IX in Kassel, Germany—the first Argentine artist invited to documenta—where he displayed an installation of twenty mattresses.

The cubistoid style that Kuitca developed and that would emerge as the artist’s distinct visual language first appeared in his ‘Desenlace’ series, which he presented at the Argentine Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recalling a cubist aesthetic and eschewing figurative references, these segmented forms and angular patterns acted as the organizing principle of his compositions in this series and have recurred throughout his oeuvre ever since.

Recent, major solo exhibitions of Kuitca’s work include the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, Uruguay (2023); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2017); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2014); The Drawing Center NY (2012); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2010); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN (2010).

Kuitca’s work is represented in distinguished museums and collections worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago IL; Buffalo AKG Art Museum NY; Dallas Museum of Art TX; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland; Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut; Los Angeles County Museum of Art CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art NY; The Morgan Library & Museum NY; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston TX; Museum of Modern Art NY; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, London.