1905 Building

Guillermo Kuitca: Everything traced nearly three decades of work from the Buenos Aires–based artist Guillermo Kuitca (born 1961), whose canvases have received significant international attention since the early 1990s. Departing from previous surveys, it explored both the conceptual nature of Kuitca’s singular painting practice, as well as its interdisciplinary origins. Kuitca’s prolific career encompasses a diverse body of work and a familiar, yet thought-provoking range of imagery. The paintings and works on paper in Everything inspired viewers to contemplate not only their relationship to the work in front of them but also their place within personal spaces and the larger world.

Kuitca has long operated in many ways outside the traditional spheres of his chosen medium, incorporating influences from sculpture, architecture, theater, film, and literature. The exhibition was organized around key themes in the artist’s work, including maps and domestic and institutional architecture—that is, mechanisms and systems by which we organize, navigate, and describe our world—while also illuminating broader themes of memory, migration and disappearance, and intersections between public and private space. It included two of Kuitca’s most ambitious works: an untitled sculptural configuration of 20 painted bed mattresses, and The Ring, a five-paneled work inspired by Wagner’s epic opera cycle. 

This exhibition was organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Miami Art Museum, Florida. It was organized at the Albright-Knox by Chief Curator Douglas Dreishpoon.