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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Sonia Becce from the artist's studio, for her assistance in cataloguing this work.
"There is nothing more contemporary than painting," Kuitca has reflected. "A painting as a battlefield about what is, what is not, what ought to be, what I like, what I hate, what I love, I don't know of any other medium that could offer such a dead end: boundary and infinity at the same time."[1] An artist who has done as much to transform painting as anyone else over the past three decades, Kuitca has plumbed the spaces of painting from the inside out, turning his canvas into a medium through which to know the world. Working betwixt and between the intimate spaces of human geography, Kuitca has given shape to the perceptual perplexities of our public and private worlds, reflecting spaciously on the ways in which we position ourselves across space and time. A prodigious young talent, Kuitca held his first gallery show at the age of 13 and built an international reputation by the early 1990s. He was invited to participate in Documenta IX (1992) and exhibited in both the Arsenale and the Argentine Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale; an acclaimed retrospective, Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, just finished a two-year tour across the United States.
Kuitca's now-familiar themes of emotional dislocation and spatial disintegration took root during the 1980s, conceptually aided by travel to Germany and his encounter with dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch's experimental Tanztheater. Bausch's surreal dance-theater commingled the language of the body and the raw violence of sexual relationships, and Kuitca has acknowledged the influence of her unconventional sets, multiple spatial perspectives, and agonistic characters. "Theater changed the work in a somewhat figurative way, with a very concrete spatial reference that rendered characters very small and walls disproportionately large," Kuitca has acknowledged. "What was theatrical in the end was the architecture, not so much the dramatic action that took place in the space."[2]
Like the contemporary series El mar dulce and Siete últimas canciones, the series Tres noches takes a cue from Bausch's choreography, staging an enigmatic human drama against a cavernous and disorienting interior space. Earlier works in the series from 1985 and 1986 suggest a narrative unfolding between three people--a couple amorously entangled in each other's arms, watched by a cryptic third figure--in a bedroom preternaturally lit by a starry night sky. The present work seemingly revisits the scene, now stripped of color and laden with a heavy sense of disquiet and unease; two figures lie prostrate on the floor while a man stands before a bed between them, chairs scattered throughout a vast and strangely luminous space. "From the beginning, it was clear to me that the story, in the anecdotal sense, had been erased," Kuitca has explained of his evolving "theatrical" works from this time, "but what was left was a strong sense that we see a scene in which something has already happened."[3] The figures still linger in the present work, but the pregnancy of the image--its palpable tension and post-coital suspense--is fraught with the historicity of their encounter. The architectural theater of the space, illuminated in a silvery incandescence, suggests both a dreamlike suspension of reality and the deconstruction of its emotional resonance, reverberating from the diminutive figures through the infinite expanse of their stage.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Guillermo Kuitca, quoted in Olga Viso, "Resistant Painting," in Guillermo Kuitca: Everything (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 64.
2) Kuitca, quoted in Graciela Speranza, "Conversations with Guillermo Kuitca," in Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, 76.
3) Ibid.
"There is nothing more contemporary than painting," Kuitca has reflected. "A painting as a battlefield about what is, what is not, what ought to be, what I like, what I hate, what I love, I don't know of any other medium that could offer such a dead end: boundary and infinity at the same time."[1] An artist who has done as much to transform painting as anyone else over the past three decades, Kuitca has plumbed the spaces of painting from the inside out, turning his canvas into a medium through which to know the world. Working betwixt and between the intimate spaces of human geography, Kuitca has given shape to the perceptual perplexities of our public and private worlds, reflecting spaciously on the ways in which we position ourselves across space and time. A prodigious young talent, Kuitca held his first gallery show at the age of 13 and built an international reputation by the early 1990s. He was invited to participate in Documenta IX (1992) and exhibited in both the Arsenale and the Argentine Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale; an acclaimed retrospective, Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, just finished a two-year tour across the United States.
Kuitca's now-familiar themes of emotional dislocation and spatial disintegration took root during the 1980s, conceptually aided by travel to Germany and his encounter with dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch's experimental Tanztheater. Bausch's surreal dance-theater commingled the language of the body and the raw violence of sexual relationships, and Kuitca has acknowledged the influence of her unconventional sets, multiple spatial perspectives, and agonistic characters. "Theater changed the work in a somewhat figurative way, with a very concrete spatial reference that rendered characters very small and walls disproportionately large," Kuitca has acknowledged. "What was theatrical in the end was the architecture, not so much the dramatic action that took place in the space."[2]
Like the contemporary series El mar dulce and Siete últimas canciones, the series Tres noches takes a cue from Bausch's choreography, staging an enigmatic human drama against a cavernous and disorienting interior space. Earlier works in the series from 1985 and 1986 suggest a narrative unfolding between three people--a couple amorously entangled in each other's arms, watched by a cryptic third figure--in a bedroom preternaturally lit by a starry night sky. The present work seemingly revisits the scene, now stripped of color and laden with a heavy sense of disquiet and unease; two figures lie prostrate on the floor while a man stands before a bed between them, chairs scattered throughout a vast and strangely luminous space. "From the beginning, it was clear to me that the story, in the anecdotal sense, had been erased," Kuitca has explained of his evolving "theatrical" works from this time, "but what was left was a strong sense that we see a scene in which something has already happened."[3] The figures still linger in the present work, but the pregnancy of the image--its palpable tension and post-coital suspense--is fraught with the historicity of their encounter. The architectural theater of the space, illuminated in a silvery incandescence, suggests both a dreamlike suspension of reality and the deconstruction of its emotional resonance, reverberating from the diminutive figures through the infinite expanse of their stage.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Guillermo Kuitca, quoted in Olga Viso, "Resistant Painting," in Guillermo Kuitca: Everything (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 64.
2) Kuitca, quoted in Graciela Speranza, "Conversations with Guillermo Kuitca," in Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, 76.
3) Ibid.