GUILLERMO KUITCA: PAINTINGS 2008-2010; LE SACRE 1992. COMPLETE IN TWO VOLUMES

Sperone Westwater, 2010. Trade paperback. Fine. Slipcase missing. A bright, fresh copy. For its inaugural exhibition at 257 Bowery, Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Guillermo Kuitca. This is Kuitca's eighth solo show with Sperone Westwater. Kuitca's new paintings developed from a series he first showed in 2007, when he represented Argentina at the Venice Biennale. While the subject of the canvases in Venice was by and large abstraction itself, in this new group Kuitca mixes the abstract with compositional motifs of his own past series. Alongside his pictorial explorations of light and shadow, color and construction, and the transparency of planes, Kuitca incorporates elements of past series such as fragmented maps, architectural floor plans, and thorns. Some works, such as Untitled (2009), are monumental in scale, while others like Philosophy for Princes I (2009) are small, emphasizing the dramatic and shifting height of the new gallery spaces. Kuitca says these paintings "emerged from an anonymous way of accessing modernism. The result is a sort of explosion of chronology, in which all references almost cancel each other out." Sperone Westwater will also exhibit Kuitca's vintage and pivotal work, Le Sacre (1992), comprised of maps painted onto 54 mattresses, all vertically installed in the gallery's 12 x 20-foot Moving Room. On each bed Kuitca has painted geographic maps of randomly selected locations from around the world, punctuated by irregularly placed buttons that serve as markers for cities. Le Sacre has been included in several museum exhibitions where the beds have been shown in various configurations, almost always installed horizontally on the floor with their legs attached. When Kuitca first made these now iconic works in the early 1990s, he envisioned the beds being vertically mounted on the walls of an enclosed space. Now, for the first time since their inception, Kuitca realizes this vision in the Moving Room, where the beds will cover the wall surface. While the room moves slowly between the 2nd and 3rd floors, viewers have the opportunity to be immersed within the installation. Speaking recently about Le Sacre, the artist has said that his map-on-mattress works represent a meeting point of private and public experiences. However it is now that I also see this large platform of beds as the surface on which a Rite or Sacre takes place. Guillermo Kuitca (born 1961 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine artist, who continues to work and live in Buenos Aires. Kuitca's work has been shown extensively around the globe, and is included in many important public collections, including The Tate Gallery, England; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY and The Daros Collection, Zürich, Switzerland, and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Kuitca represented Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recurrent themes of travel, maps, memory, and migration can be found in Kuitca’s work.