Image
Guillermo Kuitca
Image
Guillermo Kuitca

From 15 October 2024 to 31 December 2027

Guillermo Kuitca, Chapelle

Regular ticket : 16 euros

Discount ticket  : 12 euros

Family fare : Reduce fare for one or two adults with a child

Free for members

About the exhibition

 

guillermo kuitca

At the invitation of the Musée national Picasso-Paris, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961) has created a site-specific work in the chapel of the Hôtel Salé. Since his intervention at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Kuitca has developed a new language, echoing the architecture, which the artist calls ‘cubistoid painting’, in which a set of intersecting lines, like so many folds in the plane, is deployed directly on the walls, forming a new pictorial space. Kuitca describes his place on ‘the carousel of modern art’ :

"Many years ago, I painted pictures showing a luggage conveyor belt. I think thatart history was the real subject of these paintings. Art would be this carousel; the work of art, a piece of luggage and the artists, passengers. While waiting for our luggage, we ask ourselves a number of questions: ‘Will my suitcase arrive and will I be able to recognise it among other similar ones? And if I took someone else's suitcase, would I be wearing their clothes? Will my luggage be destroyed forever? For me, these questions are a meditation on inheritance . They also envision a possible encounter with Picasso, as if he were, after all, another passenger."

For Kuitca, painting has a memory. Through these experiments, he links up with the history of modern art, Cubism being invoked as the trace of a movement that operates like a diffraction of reality, the construction of an imaginary space. This site-specific installation was generously supported by the Hauser & Wirth gallery.

 

Biography

Guillermo Kuitca was 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. The cubistoid style that Kuitca developed and that would emerge as the artist’s distinct visual language first appeared in his ‘Desenlace’ series, which he presented at the Argentine Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recalling a cubist aesthetic and eschewing figurative references, these segmented forms and angular patterns acted as the organizing principle of his compositions in this series and have recurred throughout his oeuvre ever since.

Recent, major solo exhibitions of Kuitca’s work include the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, Uruguay (2023); the Lille Métropole Musée d’art modern, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, France (2021); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2017); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2014); The Drawing Center NY (2012); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2010); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN (2010). After his long-term collaboration with Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, Kuitca was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2018.