Guillermo Kuitca

He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1961.  

At the age of nine, he began his studies at the workshop of Ahuva Szlimowicz, where he remained for a decade. In 1974, at age 13, he had his first individual show at Garería Lirolay in Buenos Aires.

From 1980 to the present, he has presented more than 50 individual shows at some of the world’s most prestigious museums and contemporary art galleries, notably: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York, 1991), Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, 1990), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Montreal, 1993), Centre de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 1999), Museo de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá, 2006), The Drawing Center (New York, 2012), Pinacoteca do Estado De São Paulo (São Paulo, 2014),  and Centre PasquArt (Biel, Switzerland, 2017).

The artist is represented by Hauser & Wirth and Sperone Westwater, with whom he has exhibited regularly for 25 years.

He has participated in countless collective shows, including the São Paolo Biennials (1985, 1989, 1998), Documenta IX (Kassel, 1992), Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, 1995), and the Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, 2001), among many other international exhibitions.

His first retrospective show was organized by the IVAM (Valencia, 1993) and the Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico, 1993). In 1994, another retrospective of his pictorial work, Burning Beds, a Survey 1982-1994, was presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio, 1994) and the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, 1995). His retrospective show, Guillermo Kuitca: Works 1982-2003, organized by the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, was presented first in Spain and then traveled to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires (MALBA) after 17 years without a showing in Argentina. In the United States, Everything: Guillermo Kuitca, Paintings and Works on Paper 1980-2008, was on exhibit between 2009 and 2011 at the Miami Art Museum (Miami), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington), and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo).

His work can be found in public and private collections throughout the entire world, including venues such as: the the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museo de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanasawa, Japan, the Museum of Fine Arts in  Houston, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and MALBA-Colección Costantini in Buenos Aires, among many others.

In 2007, Guillermo Kuitca was the artist chosen to represent Argentina at the 52nd Venice Biennial, in addition to being invited to take part in the International Pavilion at that same Biennial.

In 1991 Kuitca created the Programa de Talleres para las Artes Visuales (Workshop Program for the Visual Arts) in Buenos Aires. Known as the Kuitca Fellowship and in association with various cultural and educational institutions, it contains a work and discussion space for more than one hundred young artists and new talent from various disciplines, all of whom have received scholarships since the inception of the program.

In 2004 he was named Honorary Professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).

His theatrical activity includes directing his own shows, Nadie olvida nada (Nobody Forgets Anything) and El mar dulce (The Sweet Sea) in 1982 and 1984, respectively. Especially noteworthy among his lighting and stage design projects is the scenery for García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (2002) at the Sala Martín Coronado in the Teatro San Martín, as well as his stage design for Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (2003).

In 2008 the New York Metropolitan Opera House invited Kuitca to present an individual show at the recently opened Gallery Met.

In 2009 Kuitca was commissioned to design the permanent curtain for the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, the new headquarters of the Dallas Opera.

In 2014, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris invited him to select works from his collection to present there at an exhibition called Les Habitants. In 2017, a new, expanded version, arrived at the Centro Cultural Kirchner in Buenos Aires with the title Les Visitants, consisting of the work of 23 international artists – among them Kuitca’s “David’s Living Room Revisited” – an audio-visual space in collaboration with David Lynch and Patti Smith.

In 2017 the publishing houses KBB and JRP/Ringier published a book containing a broad selection of 500 of Kuitca’s drawings, created between 1971 and 2017.