Guillermo Kuitca: Everything

Miami Art Museum

Through Jan. 17

“Time and memory” are themes everywhere present in this “outstanding retro­spective” of works by Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, said Elisa Turner in ArtNews. In the painting El mar dulce (1984), the artist’s Russian ancestors, who emigrated in the early 20th century, appear as figures wandering about a vast room. Various drawings depicting seating charts and the interiors of theaters reflect Kuitca’s side career as an international stage-production designer. And the globetrotting artist’s many travels show up in “the recurring imagery of maps, baggage, beds, and airports.” Trauerspiel (“Tragedy,” 2001), for instance, is a sleek painting of a black-and-silver baggage conveyor belt. “Frozen in time, the empty machine evokes thoughts of cycles repeating and how the past overlaps with the present.”

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In some ways, rootlessness is Kuitca’s true subject, said Fabiola Santiago in The Miami Herald. That might explain his fascination with maps. In the installation Untitled (1992), maps are painted on top of 20 mattresses. “Buttons mark major cities and capitals of the European continent. Red lines run like rivers or veins, or perhaps blood-soaked borders.” More recently the artist, who now maintains a studio in New York City, created the enormous, black-and-white Everything (2004), in which he “has dismantled the United States, as if a sinister force were at work.” Houston, Kansas City, and Oklahoma City all have their locations scrambled, “and the Canadian city Calgary is the heart of the nation.” In some cases, Kuitca clearly packs a political message into his mapmaking. In others, he’s simply creating “geography-charged abstract works”—such as Heaven (1992), “a map of the stars.”