Is The first major sample of the year And it is dedicated to one of the most famous Argentine artists inside and outside the country: Guillermo Kuitca. But it is not a retrospective or its recent material is exposed. “Kuitca 86. Nobody forgot anything to seven last songs”, in Malbaexhibits the works of the artist of the 80s, with the year 1986 as axis. More precisely, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings and archive material of three series that are a milestone in their aesthetics: “No one forgets anything” (1982), “The Sweet Sea (1983) and” Seven last songs “(1986).
“The intention is to focus in 1986, with specific leaks to iconic series immediately previous and subsequent. The narrowness of the temporary window – a kind of start of the Big Bang Kuitquiano – brings to the present to the present to That very young artist who was beginning to find in the new paintingsof a very high experimental burden, a very own language in deep concordance with its time, ”explains Sonia Becce, co-curator of the exhibition and constant collaborator of Kuitca.
“The Kuitca of 86 invites us to locate the force in the procedures before the issues, in the slow variations and in the tactics of dissemination rather than in drastic transformations,” says Nancy Rojas, the other curator of “Kuitca 86”.
In relation to Malba, some of the works gathered belong to theto the permanent collection of the museum and the staff of Eduardo Costantini. But there is another special connection with the artist: “Guillermo Kuitca. Works 1982-2002”, in 2003, was his first exhibition in Argentina since 1986, in an almost brand new malba. And the exhibition that began that long absence of the artist of the Argentine Salas was “Seven last songs”which today is part of “Kuitca 86”.
A temporal arch that renews the link of an artist and a central institution in the art of the country.
Creator’s profile
If every artist is defined through the story of his own career, Guillermo’s Kuitca turns again and again, with emphasis, around her precocity.
“In a 1963 photo, a two -year -old boy is seen, smiling on the bed, surrounded by his drawings. It is Guillermo Kuitca who has suffered a tear in one leg and must remain at rest for a prolonged period. It seems nothing contrary. He has begun to scribble with enthusiasm using crayons, pencils and papers that his parents approach him to make more tolerable rest. This reflects Sonia Becce the inaugural scene of her vocation, in the text she wrote for the sample catalog.
In 1986, the very young Kuitca was only 25 years old and had been professionally dedicated to art for more than a decade (his inaugural sample had taken place 12 years before, in the mythical Lirolay gallery). Seen from this perspective, your professional curriculum produces vertigo. Because it is also a trajectory developed almost entirely abroad, although Kuitca always produced in Argentina.
Since the ’80s he exhibited in the main museums and galleries of the world, from New York to Korea, in individual and anthological samples. He was a representative of Argentina in LA 52 edition of the Venice Biennial and Curator of the Cartier Foundation. In addition, he created in the country a pedagogical program that is already a myth, the “Scholarship Kuitca”that he had 5 editions between 1991 and 2011 and that it was an important seedbed of young artists.
The theater was his second field of activity. He wrote with Carlos Ianni three works and performed scenery for operas and theatrical pieces. The curtains of the Colón Theater and the Opera de Dallas They are of their authorship.
One of his last works is a mural intervention in the chapel of the Picasso Museum in Paris. In Mexico, it is displayed at this time “Lorca/Kuitca. Waltz in the branches” at the Zapopan Museum of Artwith works by the two artists, an exhibition that will then pass to the Federico García Lorca Center in Granada.
The MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art), the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, Queen Sofía de Madrid and La Tate have Kuitca works in their collections.
The sample
Becce and Rojas, curators of “Kuitca 86”, point to the works that make up the exhibition (from several collections, some never seen, provided by Kuitca himself) as a matrix of themes and procedures that will reappear in the artist’s future work or that represent the prelude to a subsequent change.
It is important to forget, in addition, that in these years Kuitca creates in relation to an intellectual and cultural field in full boiling, after the end of the dictatorship. The works “From 1 to 30,000” And the female figures on their backs from “No one forgets anything” They can be read, clearly, like the brand of a black stage of Argentina that just begins to be reviewed.
The theater is the other Kuitca creative channel but also a source of inspiration for painting, through figures such as Pina Bauschwhom the artist continues and studies in his presentations in Argentina as an abroad. Fellini, von Trotta, Kurosawa, Pasolini, Buñuel, Herzog, Polanski and Rainer Werner Fassbinder They can also point out as creators who inspire him in those years.
In this time The beds are consolidated as a recurring leitmotiv. “It is the Rosetta stone, its starting point and the place to which it returns more often. Kuitca has paintings with beds, beds and on beds,” says art critic Jerry Saltz, cited by Sonia Becce in the catalog. In Malba you can see the first. A little girl on a yellow background, according to the artist, remained in her study for years supported by a wall, inadvertent.
And there are still human figures in the series “The Sweet Sea” and “Seven last songs”, small lost silhouettes in immense spaces, subject to the theatrical drama that takes place with full and intense colors.
Sketches, newspaper clippings, historical photos of friends and artists complete the exhibition and give a period frame to the paintings. They evoke a climate and time. A close and moving geography of which Kuitca is a faithful witness.
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