Born, and still based, in Buenos Aires, Kuitca had his first solo exhibition at the age of only 13 in his home city and while still in his twenties he began to exhibit his art internationally. The exhibition of his works since 1980 that I saw at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has now moved on to the Hirshhorn in Washington D.C. until January 2011 so there’s still plenty of time to go and see it.
My first view of Kuitca’s work was a bright red image in the distance at the top of a flight of wide stairs. Wonderfully positioned the colour drew my tired legs up the steps before I even knew exactly what I was seeing. At nearly 8 feet across the 1995 mixed media canvas “Mozart – da Ponte I” dominated even the large space in which it was hung at the Walker Art Center. This work references the trilogy of operas produced from the collaboration of Mozart and the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In it Kuitca presents a stylised view of an 18th-Century theatre’s seating plan from the perspective of the stage. By reversing the usual audience-to-stage focus of attention the viewers effectively become the actors. Kuitca also levels the theatre’s normally hierarchical seating plan by flattening the perspective and lighting all of the seating equally.
Also part of the exhibition is the massive 1992 installation “Untitled” that brought Kuitca huge international acclaim. He painted 20 mattresses with abstractions of road maps as an exploration of personal landscapes. Irregularly placed buttons are labelled as major cities but their location relative to other “cities” bears no relation to reality in a suggestion of nothing being quite what it seems in a dream landscape.
Many of his works have been inspired by his experiences in the theatre and he has described his brushstrokes as choreographic or musical. Lines that sometimes work in unison and at other times are deliberately discordant, with many levels in between. You can compare Kuitca’s approach to “seeing a sound” with that of British contemporary artists Laurance Blackwell and Alison Pilkington.
Whilst none of his works include the human figure they all show spaces that are normally occupied by large groups of people. In doing so Kuitca is exploring physical and emotional space in both public and private arenas. Throughout his career the artist has frequently returned to the familiar motifs of theatres, maps, city plans and public buildings.
But recently his work has started to make obvious references to famous painters of modern abstract art such as Jackson Pollock and Georges Braque. Yet Kuitca does not pay homage to these modern masters by imitating their styles. Instead he represents iconic forms of abstraction as empty shells in a similar way to the empty theatres and public spaces of his earlier works. So he presents familiar images removed of all the elements that make them familiar in order to create a striking balance between personal and public landscapes.
Sadly I missed a Guillermo Kuitca exhibition at Tate Modern but am hopeful that the work of this important contemporary Latin American artist will return to the UK sometime soon. Unlike many contemporary artists he does not, unfortunately for most of us, produce any Limited Edition Art so the only way to appreciate his work is to see the real thing.
