Thirteen new oil paintings — some almost four metres long — will be on display at both Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly and Old Bond Street galleries. They revisit two of the most radical explorations of space and surface in twentieth century painting: the planar shifts and fractured visions encountered in Picasso and Braque’s Cubist paintings; and Fontana’s iconic slashed canvases, which parted the normal parameters of painting to encompass the real world.
Kuitca is known for his paintings of maps, plans and architectural diagrams that both locate the individual in relation to an ordered whole, and explore the personal versus the universal. His works explore the fallibility of borders such as public and personal, national and international, physical and psychological.
To make the works in this exhibition, Kuitca let human movement at its most elementary dictate his movements. Pacing to and fro in front of his canvases, he marked them with short diagonal strokes as he walked, echoing a revelation he experienced at the age of nineteen that has influenced all his mature work: seeing the theatre of the avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch in Buenos Aires, he was struck by her dictum that ‘walking is enough’.
Confined to this minimum, the smallness of human movement is posed against an awareness of the vastness of the unknown. This contrast, pitting the intimate against the infinite lies at the heart of Kuitca’s practice: “I am interested in the major contradiction between a medium like painting, which is so specific and partial,” he has explained, “and the abyss of an enormous knowledge of things.”
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