Demystifying Guillermo Kuitca’s Prodigious Practice

A black and white photograph in the archive display at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires shows a young Guillermo Kuitca hunched over a copy of Pinacoteca de los genios (Gallery of Geniuses), a serialized art publication popular in 1970s Argentina. The image helps construct the origin myth that came to define Kuitca: a child prodigy whose precocious debut aged 13 at Galería Lirolay in 1974 seemed to foretell his own art canonization.

Conceived by curators Sonia Becce and Nancy Rojas, ‘Kuitca 86’ takes the year of Kuitca’s last solo gallery show in his hometown of Buenos Aires as a temporal axis along which to look forward and backward. This unconventional retrospective collates Kuitca’s seminal early series – ‘Nobody Forgets Anything’ (1982), ‘The Sweet Sea’ (1983–84) and ‘Seven Last Songs’ (1986) – alongside drawings and archival materials situating these works within a network of references. The result is a biographical cartography functioning as a counter-narrative to the figure of the male artistic genius, foregrounding instead the relational, material and historical contingencies that shaped his practice.

The show maps the emergence of Kuitca’s pictorial language, developed amid the fall of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship (1976–83) and the euphoria of the country’s subsequent ‘democratic spring’. During the military regime, mass arrests led to the disappearance of an estimated 30,000 people – a trauma Kuitca addressed in From 1 to 30,000 (1980) by enumerating the missing in hand-painted, numerical form. At around the same time, the human figure began appearing in Kuitca’s work, a motif this exhibition crystallizes as central to his practice. The first painting in the series ‘Nobody Forgets Anything’, for instance, depicts a single schematic female devoid of spatial reference; as the series unfolds, however, this figure repeats, multiplies and gradually acquires bodily texture.

The series ‘The Sweet Sea’ was developed after the eponymous play Kuitca co-directed with Carlos Ianni in 1984. Here, compositions unfold as fragmented stage sets, where bodies gain corporeal density and interact in simultaneous, disjointed scenes: men drag women; a child pulls her hair down; chairs and tables are scattered. These images recall the gestural lexicon of neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch, a key influence on Kuitca during that period.

In ‘Seven Last Songs’, space expands while bodies recede, leaving only traces, both physical – beds, chairs – and atmospheric. One painting introduces a floor plan, a recurring element in Kuitca’s practice to this day, marking a shift not toward abstraction but toward presence defined by absence. Here, domestic space becomes the site where memory is inscribed. This dissolution of the human figure finds its antecedent in I, As the Angel (1984), where a winged male figure, an allegorical self, holds a severed head, introducing the idea of the self as split, othered. In ‘Seven Last Songs’, this exploration of fractured identity heightens in complexity: a seated man resembling the artist is mirrored across an absent surface; in another painting, a woman wraps her legs around the shadow of a man, beneath which appear the words: ‘I lie, but my voice does not.’ Subjectivity resounds as a dissonant echo, haunting the spaces between existence and loss.

Toward the end of the exhibition, in a room where the human figure has vanished from the canvas but its spectre lingers, stands Kuitca 86 (2024), the only recent work on view. This scale model of an artist’s studio – in which every element, from walls to bedcovers, is paint-splattered – is rendered with irony and tenderness. The miniature mise-en-scène operates less as a nostalgic homage than as a conceptual device, foregrounding the constructed nature of artistic subjectivity and revealing the scaffolding behind the myth of the artist.

Guillermo Kuitca, ‘Kuitca 86’, is on view at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires until 16 June

_{Main image: Guillermo Kuitca, ‘Kuitca 86’, exhibition view. Photograph: Santiago Orti; courtesy: MALBA}