.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Guillermo Kuitca is one of the most important members of the contemporary Latin American Art scene. He acts, simultaneously, through his own output as well as through his popular local workshops, as an important channel between young Argentine artists and their growing international audience.
Kuitca's career as a painter began at the tender age of nine. Although his training was never of an academic nature, his capacity for self-expression was cultivated from the very beginnings. The legislative turmoil of the 70s and the consequent installment of a corruption-ridden regime dominated the political landscape of the artist's native soil during his early years. Though Kuitca and his family were not directly affected by these events, the artist's proximity and knowledge of various "disappearances" has visibly informed the content of many of his works from the 1980s.
Untitled (Future) dates from this period and clearly reflects two themes that run persistently through Kuitca's oeuvre. On one hand, the then twenty-six year-old artist paints in an effort to process the gruesome stories that surround him; on the other he explores new paths of artistic production, using as his medium only materials within immediate reach.
While the representation of the empty room with the single light-source is overpoweringly barren and seemingly theatrical, the somewhat heavy coating of the canvas indicates a brutality of application that epitomizes the honesty and outspokenness of the artist.
"For me painting is the way of entering the world, not of leaving it" (Kuitca quoted in "Hans-Michael Herzog in Conversation with Guillermo Kuitca", in Das Lied von der Erde, exh. cat,. Daros Latin America, Zurich 2006). As such, Kuitca often produces drawings on the themes of his paintings after their completion, thus investigating deeply into the impulses that drive his art, in a constant search of identifying his position in relation to civilisation at large.
Kuitca's career as a painter began at the tender age of nine. Although his training was never of an academic nature, his capacity for self-expression was cultivated from the very beginnings. The legislative turmoil of the 70s and the consequent installment of a corruption-ridden regime dominated the political landscape of the artist's native soil during his early years. Though Kuitca and his family were not directly affected by these events, the artist's proximity and knowledge of various "disappearances" has visibly informed the content of many of his works from the 1980s.
Untitled (Future) dates from this period and clearly reflects two themes that run persistently through Kuitca's oeuvre. On one hand, the then twenty-six year-old artist paints in an effort to process the gruesome stories that surround him; on the other he explores new paths of artistic production, using as his medium only materials within immediate reach.
While the representation of the empty room with the single light-source is overpoweringly barren and seemingly theatrical, the somewhat heavy coating of the canvas indicates a brutality of application that epitomizes the honesty and outspokenness of the artist.
"For me painting is the way of entering the world, not of leaving it" (Kuitca quoted in "Hans-Michael Herzog in Conversation with Guillermo Kuitca", in Das Lied von der Erde, exh. cat,. Daros Latin America, Zurich 2006). As such, Kuitca often produces drawings on the themes of his paintings after their completion, thus investigating deeply into the impulses that drive his art, in a constant search of identifying his position in relation to civilisation at large.