Argentine painter and theatre director. He began painting as a child and held his first one-man show at the age of 13 at the Galería Lirolay, Buenos Aires. In 1978 he won first prize in drawing in the Salon of the Sociedad Hebraica Argentina. He travelled to Europe in 1980, where he met the choreographer Pina Bausch. In 1982 he won the Grand Prix in the Arché Biennale at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. At that time he established his mature style, which contained numerous references to literature, theatre and scenography. Combinations of visual signs within expansive pictorial spaces, supplemented in meaning by the titles (e.g. Nobody Forgets Anything, 1982; artist’s col., see 1991–2 exh. cat.), reflect the dramatic tone of his work as an experimental theatre director. The scenes and plastic elements, such as beds, introduced in the late 1980s were polyfunctional. They allowed Kuitca to raise personal biography to the level of collective statement, as found in his images based on his grandparents’ emigration to Argentina (e.g. Gentle Sea, 1987; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.). In 1987 he began to include in his paintings city maps and plans of a four-room apartment, which extended the parallels between private and collective. The creation of an irrational perspective, the explicit or concealed presence of sex and the successive montages of planes and characters make Kuitca’s painting a visual opera with wide repercussions.
Horacio Safons
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford University Press