An Immersion in the Beginnings of a Fundamental Artist

“Kuitca 86” at Malba: An Immersion in the Beginnings of a Fundamental Artist

Until June 16, 2025, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) presents Kuitca 86, an exhibition dedicated to the early years of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca's work (Buenos Aires, 1961). Curated by Sonia Becce and Nancy Rojas, the exhibition brings together three fundamental series: Nadie olvidar nada (Nobody Forgets Anything, 1982), El mar dulce (Sweet Sea, 1983), and Siete últimas canciones (Seven Last Songs, 1986), works that explore the connection between space, memory, and the human condition.

The exhibition offers a journey through early works that reflect a sensibility shaped by the Argentine historical context of the 1980s. In these pieces, Kuitca presents scenes charged with emotional tension, featuring uninhabited rooms, everyday objects, and figures that seem absent or in a state of introspection.

Beds, a recurring element in his work, are presented as symbols of absence and waiting. Alongside them, chairs, doors, and walls become silent witnesses to a drama that is never fully revealed. Architecture becomes a stage for contained emotions, where every stroke and every object suggests an unspoken story.

In the series Siete últimas canciones (Seven Last Songs), the focus shifts to traces, the imprints left by bodies and experiences. It is in these later works that painting takes on an even more intense poetic and symbolic charge. As one of the works states: "I lie, but my voice doesn't lie," a phrase that encapsulates the spirit of an artistic proposal that challenges from the intimate and the collective.

Kuitca 86 allows the public to rediscover one of the most relevant artists of contemporary Argentine art at a key moment in his career, when he was beginning to define the elements that would run through his entire subsequent output.

The exhibition can be visited at Malba (Av. Pres. Figueroa Alcorta 3415, Buenos Aires City) until June 16, 2025.

On the cover: Kuitca 86. The vestiges of matter / Photo taken from ArteAlDía

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