Guillermo Kuitca (B. 1961)

Galería Julia Lublin, Buenos Aires
Acquired from the above by the present owner

The work presents some minor abrasions along the edges. Ultraviolet light examination revealed no sign of inpainting or repair. Otherwise in very good condition.
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In 1980, Guillermo Kuitca had his first encounter with the experimental dance theatre of German choreographer Pina Bausch. Heavily influential on his early painting, Bausch’s collaborative and participatory performance work engaged Kuitca’s interest in the tension between the human figure and negative space, and the ability of simple artistic language to express complex emotional ideas. As he remarked later in his career to Graciela Speranza, “In the thought of Pina Bausch, there was something that struck me a lot - she had shown that in dance, walking was enough. That was a kind of minimalist thinking that I understood profoundly. Sometimes walking was enough.”[1]

Kuitca’s style of “minimalist thinking” led him to exploit the artistic possibilities of the empty stage itself. This untitled painting is emblematic of his seminal production in its emotionally charged ambiguity. At once inextricable from and in rejection of the Buenos Aires of 1986, this work speaks to the invasion of private life by State violence both in figurative content and formal qualities. The theatrical downward rake of the picture plane places the spectator as a voyeur into the aftermath of an act of violence. Furniture here takes on as much narrative possibility as human figures, as the bed, a leitmotif in Kuitca’s work, seems to provide a space of tenuous respite and safety in an otherwise threatening and illegible space.

Despite a professed hatred for Argentina under the military rule of the early 1980s, Kuitca, himself a grandchild of exiled Ukrainian Jews, has rarely left it throughout his career. In early works and throughout his career, the empty stage, be it a map, an opera hall or an ominous red room, becomes the space of an imaginary exile, at once dangerous and filled with possibilities.

1: from Graciela Speranza, “Dialogue with Guillermo Kuitca,” in Guillermo Kuitca: Obras 1982-1998. Conversaciones con Graciela Speranza, Barcelona, 1998