KUITCA~Guillermo
PRICE ON REQUEST
Author: Carvajal~Rina
Publisher: Witte de With, Rotterdam
Year: 1990
Artist: KUITCA~Guillermo
ISBN: 90-73362-02-4
Antiquarian catalogue
750 copies; Dutch/English. Introduction by Chris Dercon, size 27,5 x 22 cm; 32 pages, 12 color and 12 black-and-white photographs. Biography.
Guillermo Kuitca
The publication Guillermo Kuitca appears on the occasion of the exhibition Guillermo Kuitcathat took place at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (2 juni – 15 juli 1990).
The exhibition for the Argentine Guillermo Kuitca in Witte de With, but also the one for the Mexican Julio Galán, were the first comprehensive exhibitions in Holland and the rest of Europe. They were at the same time an experiment for Witte de With: two artists, two exhibitions, two publications and yet connected.
Julio Galán and Guillermo Kuitca’s paintings and objects, however different the visual languages of the two artists may be, fit together in a special way. They contradict and augment each other. In Galán’s bright, colourful, occasionally devout or coarse rural scenes and in Kuitca’s dark, grey, nocturnal portrayals of cities and anonymous houses, the artists depict stories, which are too bright or too dark for any melancholy, yet always balance on the brink of ecstasy or catastrophe, and stories about adolescence, men and women – especially men – and about the continuing life and the future of painting in Monterrey and Buenos Aires, and elsewhere.
in the style of ex-votos and colonial retablos, are sophisticated records of personal emotions and memories that are full of complex iconographical references. His Ni???o Dios (Christ Child) (1986), for example, looks like a devotional icon, but sacredness is replaced by a sublimated feeling of personal identification and vulnerability. Gal???n, like Kuitca, uses a specific sense of place to represent a psychic state; his images are situated in another world, in an order of pre-birth, post-mortem and dream state. While Kuitca’s desolate apartments seem to remain within the boundaries of the surface of the world and of its unlivable nature, Galan’s oniric images suggest that art can be both a form of suffering and one of healing.
This exhibition, which was the first European presentation for both Galan and Kuitca, comprised about twenty works from1985-1990 by each painter.
