.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Blau bart (Bluebeard) reflects the importance of Pina Bausch in Kuitca's painting of the 1980s. Kuitca has said that Bausch was "the pictorial matrix of my work" (G. Kuitca quoted in Kuitca, exh. cat, Madrid 2002, p. 261). The artist's initial contact with the work of the German dancer and performer was through photography. Kuitca attended his first Pina Bausch show at Café Muller in Buenos Aires in 1980 where he was so fascinated by it that he later visited the headquarters of the choreographer's company in Wuppertal and for some time became heavily involved with the theatre. Bausch's company "was composed of dancers who had renounced dance" and Kuitca once observed that, "I felt like a painter who had renounced painting"... "There was no theatre eruption in my painting other than the simple figurative delimiting of a scenic space". (Ibid)
The painting is a scene with Bluebeard as a central figure carrying a faceless woman on his back, a girl sitting on a chair, a woman crawling with boots on her hands instead of gloves, a figure by the wall...a bed next door...These appear to be the tormented wives of the fairytale figure, each condemned to her own marital damnation. However in Blau bart the myth is imbued with a strange, dark and pointedly modern relevance. As the artist says, 'Painting is a way of understanding the world'. (Ibid).
The painting is a scene with Bluebeard as a central figure carrying a faceless woman on his back, a girl sitting on a chair, a woman crawling with boots on her hands instead of gloves, a figure by the wall...a bed next door...These appear to be the tormented wives of the fairytale figure, each condemned to her own marital damnation. However in Blau bart the myth is imbued with a strange, dark and pointedly modern relevance. As the artist says, 'Painting is a way of understanding the world'. (Ibid).