The Art Newspaper

Kuitca brings a bit of drama to Miami

The artist discusses his first major US survey in more than ten years

By Charlotte Burns. From Art Basel Miami Beach daily edition
Published online: 04 December 2009

“I think you can map pretty much anything,” says Guillermo Kuitca, “but I don’t know what type of map this show represents.” Kuitca’s first major US survey in more than ten years, “Everything: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008” at the Miami Art Museum (until 17 January 2010), charts almost 30 years of work—a prodigious feat considering the artist is only 48 years old.

Since his first exhibition aged 13, Kuitca’s ascendancy has been stellar. A second exhibition at 19 was followed in 1982 with a prize for being the Argentine young artist of the year. Then he saw a performance by avant-garde dancer Pina Bausch. It was a revelation: Bausch’s choreography was vital and full of possibilities, at a time when painting seemed to him moribund and restrictive. After a pilgrimage to Bausch’s Tanztheater in Wuppertal, Kuitca staged his first theatre piece Nobody Forgets Anything in 1982, and painted a breakthrough series of the same name.

The influence of the theatre pulses through this exhibition. The theatrical suspension of belief becomes disembodied drama in Kuitca’s work. He is often compared to fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the famous creator of literary labyrinths. But it is Samuel Beckett’s stark minimalism that kicks off this retrospective. The worlds of Kuitca and Beckett are steeped in suppressed suspense, and convey a sense that the viewer has missed the crucial action. “In the first few gallery spaces, you arrive to the scene too late. It is almost like a theatrical depiction,” says Kuitca, who has in mind a set design for Beckett’s bleak “Krapp’s Last Tape”.

His formative years as a painter coincided with the harshest period of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and which led to the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of people suspected of political dissidence. Kuitca was too young to feel personally threatened, but admits that it was “like playing in a minefield”. Although his work avoids overt political protest, it radiates tension and compels the viewer to participate. “If the viewer is confronted with the abyss of the blank canvas, then I think the painting is a success,” he says.

This ambivalence and sense of shattered vision is seen in Kuitca’s map works—part of his practice since the late 1980s—which move from direct representation to extreme abstraction. “The maps, for me, were to get lost and not orientated,” says Kuitca, whose later works include maps substituting peoples’ names for places, and floor plans of theatres, prisons and stadiums which have been rotated, inverted or exploded to create a new viewpoint. The show includes his series of mattresses painted with maps, such as 1992’s Untitled, a group of 20 children’s mattresses arranged on the floor. The work was in 1992’s Documenta and also featured in Kuitca’s first UK exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1994.

Kuitca focuses on spaces, both literal and imagined, and charts oppositions between reality and fiction, public and private. Although there are leitmotifs that recur—beds, maps, conveyor belts—Kuitca’s work escapes easy definition. “I didn’t want to be ‘the Argentinian artist who makes maps’,” he says. “Maps are important, but I don’t want to distort reality. I want to put them into perspective.”

He stands apart from most modern movements, and lives in Buenos Aires rather than an art world hub like New York. While he says: “I am definitely a Latin American artist—this is just fact,” he insists that “Latin America contains so many different countries with so many different realities, that it is too big and too contradictory to define.”

He maintains that the exhibition in Miami can only be seen as representative of Latin American art if “you understand that identity as hybrid and rich,” and the show is certainly rich. Painting dominates the show. It is the heartbeat, the battleground in which Kuitca wrestles with his practice. Painting is not a means for enacting resistance, but resistance itself. “I like to see where painting can go, where it can take you.” For Kuitca, it is elastic.

His recent work takes the weighty space of art history on its shoulders. His representation at the Argentine Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, If I Were Winter Itself, used the vocabulary of modern greats such as Fontana, Picasso and Leger. Taking the 100th anniversary of Picasso’s famous cubist work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as a cue—“this was my 100 years of solitude,” Kuitca says, laughing—it was seen as a new direction for him after two years away from the canvas, although it is perhaps more a continuation of his investigation into the possibilities of painting. He is currently working on a new body of works which “explore lines that started with the Venice works” for the opening show of the new Sperone Westwater gallery in 2010.

“You prepare yourself to have one of those moments, an epiphany,” said Kuitca about his survey show. “But in the end it doesn’t happen that way.” The works, like their creator, are independent and confront each visitor, challenging them to chart their own landscape. “Sometimes I have the feeling that it is the painting itself which is private. It’s not my privacy, but the paintings which challenge the viewer to be private with it.”