GUILLERMO KUITCA

Details
GUILLERMO KUITCA

Sin Título (A Triptych on Mattresses)

signed and dated Kuitca 1989 on the reverse--oil on plastic-covered mattress
each mattress measuring 86 5/8 x 55 1/8in. (220 x 140cm.)overall measurements: 86 5/8 x 165 3/8in. (220 x 420cm.)

Painted in 1989
Provenance
Thomas Cohn--Arte Contemporanea, Rio de Janeiro
Literature

Exhibited

Engraved

Lot Essay

".... in an untitled triptych of 1989 (...) , the mattress is both the support and the subject of the painting. The three second-hand mattresses in this work carry, like Christ's shroud, the memory, in the form of discharge and waste, of another's body. Kuitca paints maps on these mattresses, suggesting the space of daily experience and the dreams of journeys taken. The bruises and stains on the mattresses become signs of the subject's experience. The map is laid over this metaphorical body, which mediates between the self and the world. The spaces between the three parts of the triptych register both as distances to be traversed and as the discontinuities between the self and the world. They signal a condition of rupture and violence. One falls between places, between bodies."
Charles Merewether, Displacement and the Reinvention of Identity, Museum of Modern Art, 1992, op.cit.