Internationally acclaimed artist Guillermo Kuitca will represent Argentina in the 52nd Venice Biennale 2007. Housed in the early 17th-century Ateneo Veneto, located near the opera house La Fenice in Campo San Fantin, the Argentine Pavilion will be open to the public from 10 June through 23 September 2007. The artist has created four large-scale paintings specifically for this exhibition.

In addition to showing in the Argentine Pavilion, Guillermo Kuitca’s work will be represented significantly in Biennale Commissioner Robert Storr’s central international exhibition Think with the Senses—Feel With the Mind: Art in the Present Tense. Thirty-eight canvases from the artist’s ongoing “Diarios” series will be featured.

Sergio Baur, Counselor of the Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship, and Mercedes Parodi, Cultural Attaché to the Argentine Embassy in Italy, are Commissioners of the Pavilion, which is curated by Inés Katzenstein, Curator, Malba-Colección Costantini, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

Kuitca, who was Argentina’s representative at the 1989 São Paulo Bienal, says, “It has been many years since I officially represented my country in an exhibition. At this moment in my career, I must say being asked was unexpected. It was a happily surprising request—and one to which you must say yes!” He adds, “In the spirit of the Biennale I wanted to create something in a different direction, something that hasn’t much to do with my past work. I can’t think of a better venue than the Venice Biennale to do this, to reach back into art historical time and movements and create from these a new form, which will be shown for the first time in this extraordinary historically significant building and city. Also, it is a particularly great feeling to be in this one directed by Rob Storr, whom I respect so much.”

“This new series of paintings is a dramatic change in the work of Guillermo Kuitca,” comments Inés Katzenstein. “Instead of relying on technical codes of space representation — coming from either cartography or architecture—as he has done in previous works and series, he is for the first time referring to the history of modern painting; specifically to certain heroic moments of the history of abstraction.

“Presenting this new work in the context of the Venice Biennale is a meaningful, brave, and even polemic gesture,” she continues. “Moreover, since the consequences of the dialogue between this new work and the Baroque images of the Ateneo Veneto are uncertain, the whole project is both a challenge and an open proposal to how the art will interact.”

Upcoming Multi-venue Retrospective and Artist’s Biography

The first comprehensive retrospective of Guillermo Kuitca’s art to travel in the United States in fifteen years has been initiated by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in association with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Examining over two decades of the artist’s painting and including approximately 45 canvases and 20 works on paper made between 1982 and 2008, Guillermo Kuitca will open in June 2009 at the Hirshhorn Museum, and tour until 2011 to the Albright-Knox, the Miami Art Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Guillermo Kuitca is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York (http://www.speronewestwater.com )