GUILLERMO KUITCA’S NEW WORK ON LANDSCAPES

Pintura sin muros (Painting without walls) showcases the evolution of Kuitca’s use of floorplans, maps, and bedrooms, as well as cubistic structures to visually fragment the surfaces of his paintings. Here, for the first time in his five-decade career, Kuitca will also present landscapes. The exhibition is curated by Tobias Ostrander, independent curator working in Mexico City and London, and former chief curator of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Landscape is a subject the artist's practice has not previously addressed. In Pintura sin muros it plays a prominent role with paintings that reference an array of geographies, from snow-covered mountains to fields of brown and green. Several of these works depict waves dashing a rocky coast, with the ocean's distant horizon bisecting each composition. Kuitca's landscapes recall areas of his native Argentina, specifically the Andes Mountains, the fertile fields of the Pampas and the coast of nearby Uruguay. Such direct references to his homeland are unprecedented within the artist's output; but consistent with previous subjects in his oeuvre, Kuitca's landscapes incorporate provocative superimpositions—house plans layered onto or disintegrating into natural vistas—to represent the dissolving of interior and exterior spaces into a unified, existential whole.

Some of these latest paintings on view in the exhibition eschew the device of house plans altogether, and instead evoke the roads and mountain ranges that one would typically find on a map. Like house plans, maps represent a codified visual language—a standardized form of visual communication—that the artist can manipulate into a lyrical abstraction.

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.

Pintura sin muros. Exhibition by Guillermo Kuitca.

Through January 13, 2024.

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, USA.