Guillermo Kuitca "Paintings 2008-2010, Le Sacre 1992"
Sperone Westwater
This event has ended.
For its inaugural exhibition at 257 Bowery, Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Guillermo Kuitca and the artist's vintage and pivotal work, "Le Sacre," comprised of maps painted onto 54 mattresses, all vertically installed in the gallery’s 12 x 20-foot Moving Room.
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.”
On each bed in "Le Sacre," 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.”
Media
Schedule
from September 22, 2010 to November 06, 2010