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Guillermo Kuitca
Argentinian • b. 1961
Biography
Guillermo Kuitca is an Argentinean child prodigy who held his first solo exhibition at age thirteen. He emerged as a painter during the 1980s, rejecting the neoexpressionist trend of the time. Yet his art is intellectually demanding, formally complex and relevant to the historical moment.
Kuitca is influenced by Antoni Tápies, Francis Bacon, Jenny Holzer and Pina Bausch. His paintings denote total abstraction and deal with space, language, deat, and travel. His series of maps from the 1990s depicted on canvases and mattresses explore themes of disappearance, migration and the importance of memory. He rarely depicts humans, and his map paintings are difficult to decipher geographically, allowing viewers to meditate on the psychology of space.
Insights
Kuitca's involvement with theater allowed him to introduce elements of scale in his works, also making the physical enormity of his paintings theatrical.
Kuitca lives alone in Belgrano, Argentina and has been working with the same studio assistants for the past twenty years. One of the assistants is the daughter of his first and only painting teacher.
His map series was stimulated by his multiple trips into Rand McNally, a defunct map shop in Manhattan that he would wander into and buy whichever map caught his eye.