MALBA presents new Guillermo Kuitca exhibition

“Certain voices still move me,” sang Juan Carlos Baglietto in 'Tratando de crecer,' with lyrics by Fito Páez. Kuitca 86, the newly inaugurated exhibition at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), captures something of that sentiment: what Kuitca experienced in 1986 is revisited in the present, reviving those emotions – or, rather, updating them – in a context that demands it.

The curatorial approach of Kuitca 86 focuses on that pivotal year in Argentina's history, which marked a critical societal transition: confronting the atrocities of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, learning to sustain democracy, rebuilding a country coming to terms with 30,000 disappeared people and stolen babies and, despite everything, continuing to live.

In artistic circles, reactions took the form of bodily freedom, laughter, dance, and music — bands like Virus, Los Abuelos de la Nada, and Los Twist led the charge. Underground theatre and performance art also emerged. Within this context, Kuitca, then in his mid-twenties (having held his first solo exhibition at 13), intensified his engagement with drama, channelling influences from artists outside his immediate field.

As a precocious artist, by 1986, Kuitca was already questioning his commitment to painting. Seeking something to reignite his passion, he turned to film, dance, and theatre. The works displayed at MALBA reflect these crossovers, with references to Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein and Café Müller by Pina Bausch.

“Painting was always where I had to find a way for the themes that obsessed me to take form,” the artist said at a press roundtable attended by Perfil.

Beyond the paintings, the museum has dedicated a space to Kuitca’s archives from those years. One photograph encapsulates the spirit of the 1980s: an image by Alejandro Kuropatwa, featuring Kuitca alongside Divina Gloria and Batato Barea, after a Fito Páez concert. Another snapshot of the era is a series of photos from the artist's former studio in the Once district, previously owned by rock nacional star Charly García, who was cementing his solo career at the time.

The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of Kuitca’s debut at the Lirolay gallery in 1974 and marks 22 years since his work was first shown at MALBA.

The selection also marks a turning point in his artistic evolution: during this period, the human figure gained prominence in his work, only to dissolve later, leaving traces of its presence. That year, he presented his Seven Last Songs series at Julia Lublin’s Galería del Retiro — his final Argentine exhibition before this MALBA retrospective.

Among the exhibited works are paintings never before shown in Argentina, including Del 1 al 30.000, which was created when Kuitca was 19 in 1980, featuring a sequence of numbers up to the estimated figure of those disappeared by the military junta.

Visitors can also see the Nobody Forgets Anything series, which is painted on fragments of furniture taken from his studio on Cangallo street and his most recent work, created specifically for this exhibition: Kuitca 86, a model recreating a room entirely covered in multicoloured paint.

Sonia Becce, the co-curator of the exhibition, explains: “The aim is to focus on 1986, with specific connections to iconic series immediately before and after. The narrow temporal window — a kind of Big Bang in Kuitca’s trajectory — brings back the young artist who, in his new paintings, infused with an intense experimental charge, was beginning to find a language deeply in tune with his era."

Curator Nancy Rojas adds: “The Kuitca of 1986 invites us to locate power in his methods rather than themes, in slow variations and the tactic of dissemination rather than drastic transformations. From a geopolitical perspective, and acknowledging the crisis of modernist artistic canons, this exhibition revisits interpretations of the fragmented structure of modern and contemporary art. In this sense, it reinforces the vision of Latin American art as a mosaic of partial narratives, subject to temporal spillovers that enable intergenerational connections.”