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The Disorienting, Confounding And Enthralling New Work Of Guillermo Kuitca
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through August 11)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
As if dreams of buildings, rooms, floor plans, and landscape had landed within his abstract works, Guillermo Kuitca’s often mysterious images take viewers into a world entirely different from our own. At LA’s Hauser & Wirth, Kuitca’s works collapse, repeat, and spatially shift the spaces they represent, weaving a visual language that is both surreal and yet recognizable, evoking both past and future and an impossible present. The exhibition offers viewers a robust variety of the Argentinian artist’s work, including lustrous mixed media on paper images that represent performance spaces such as the Hollywood Bowl, Staples Center, and the Sydney Opera House, among others.
In this series of untitled works that reference the names of each venue in parentheses, the artist uses seating charts as his starting point, as he distorts and collapses physical spaces, creating a kind of visual origami of the venues, distorting and constricting seats, presenting explosive shapeless colors or compressed images that resemble an actual crushed and crumpled seating chart. Their vivid colors remind one of pinned butterflies or kaleidoscopic prisms; they seem to writhe, to reshape the familiar into ancient but vivid…
