 Guillermo Kuitca In his first exhibition at the Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Guillermo Kuitca is showing new paintings revolving around the subject of the conveyor belt. His elegantly and dreamily painted road and city maps, genealogical charts, theatre stages and apartment floor plans represent a world of places located between here and there, of spaces and events between reality and fiction and biographies between home and exile. One map has only places called San Juan de la Cruz - nowhere is everywhere. A street map has all the streets replaced by bones. The walls of the apartment plans are crying. Beds with maps painted on them combine the private and the public sides of the human condition. While Kuitca's earlier works have figures entering the stage sets, his paintings since the nineties have become increasingly depersonalised. The only human traces to be found are the pieces of luggage circulating on the conveyor belts as in Untitled (Unclaimed luggage) (2000). On a red background, we make out the shapes of luggage carousels. They are depicted from a bird's eye view like in construction drawings. The pencilled lines are so thin, almost scratched into the red paint, that they very nearly seem to fade forever. The dynamically arranged bright rectangles of the suitcases travelling on the belts provide some relief in the endless circulation of the luggage carousels. In Trauerspiel (2001), the narrative element is reduced to the title, the German word for tragedy, literally a "mourning play". The object depicted is a conveyor belt whose schematic representation is broken up by a realistic treatment of the curtain fabric and the metal belt, which creates an ambivalent relationship of closeness and distance. The empty conveyor belt testifies to an absence, and the viewer cannot help the feeling that this is a lasting emptiness. At the same time, the monumental quality of the painting indicates a promise that cannot or does not want to be fulfilled. It is up to the viewers to fill this stage with their own longings and ideas. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue. Ausstellungsdauer: 15.9. - 13.10.2001 Oeffnungszeiten: Di-Fr 12-18 Uhr, Sa 11-16 Uhr Galerie Hauser & Wirth Löwenbräum-Areal Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zürich Telefon: 01-446 80 60 Fax: 01-446 80 65 E-Mail: info@ghw.ch www.ghw.ch |
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