Skip to navigation Skip to main content

Guillermo Kuitca

Guillermo Kuitca (1961) began his series of Diarios (Diaries), of which 19 paintings are in the possession of Mudam, in 1994 and he has continued working on it up to the present day. Visitors to the exhibition of the diaries during the 2007 Venice Biennial were struck by the enormous richness of the variations. Kuitca’s original idea was to recycle a number of unfinished paintings, the canvasses of which covered a garden table in the artist’s studio. Over the course of time, however, the series was extended by a further diary every three to six months and it thus developed into a project in its own right. Even today the tondi are completely unplanned; they incorporate the traces of time and the artist’s personal activities, regardless of whether they are experiments with colour or doodles drawn during a telephone conversation. Layers of Kuitca’s artistic and private biography are superimposed like a palimpsest without being in any way anecdotal. The works highlight the craftsmanship involved in painting; they offer coded insights into the secrets of the studio and show the artist in his role as maker. Devoid of any formal, compositional or rational inner coherence, the only logic the works follow is that of time. Kuitca worked with cartographic material in earlier series of paintings and this time he has produced what might be described as a cartography of time. “Let’s say a Diario evolves without me being involved. After a certain period of time it is finished. But there is no notion of completion here and no expectation of a result.” (Guillermo Kuitca)

Artworks

  1. Guillermo Kuitca Diarios since 1994 till 2000, 1994–2000

    Technique mixte sur toile
    19 tondi
    ø120 cm chacun
    Collection Mudam Luxembourg
    Acquisition 2000
    © Photo : Gustavo Lowry

The most important collection of contemporary art in Luxembourg Explore the Mudam Collection