Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961)

Elizabeth Franck Gallery, Knokke-Le-Zout
Private Collection, Belgium

Buenos Aires, Galería del Retiro, Guillermo Kuitca. Pinturas, October 9-27, 1984
Knokke-Le-Zout, Elisabeth Franck Gallery, Guillermo Kuitca, 1985

Carmen Alborch, Eduardo Lipschutz-Villa, Jerry Saltz, et. al., A Book Based on Guillermo Kuitca, Amsterdam, 1993, p. 179, illustrated
Graciela Speranza, Guillermo Kuitca, Obras 1982-1998, Santafé de Bogotá, 1998, p. 43, illustrated in color

This painting should be hung in its current state. The canvas is well stretched. It has slightly relaxed on its stretcher, but it probably should not be tightened. The paint layer is cleaned and varnished. There are a few tiny spots of retouching in the red, but none are of any note. There are a couple of retouches in the center of the bottom edge that are slightly visible and a little bit of frame abrasion across the upper edge and the upper left corner, but the condition is excellent overall. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
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Gabriella Speranza: In El Mar dulce, of 1984, film bursts onto the theater scene with the famous image from Battleship Potemkin that later reappears in your work. Why that particular choice?

Guillermo Kuitca : The little stroller in Odessa is an image that I adopted as a leitmotif. It wasn’t a quotation from the movie, which I saw only long afterwards, but from a frame of that scene, which I took from a magazine. Francis Bacon, who was an important painter for me when I was twelve or thirteen, had worked with other frames from the movie. But there is also a family history. Even today, I don’t know much about my family, but I know that my grandparents were from Kiev, and I supposed that, like most of the Russian Jews who came to the Río de la Plata, they sailed from Odessa. So, for me, that stroller tumbling down was like my grandparents leaving port. Hence, El mar dulce, the title of these works. In that imaginary relation, the title connects this side of the world with Odessa on the other side. And there is an even darker story, still surrounded by an aura of mystery, which involves the death of a sister of my father, a baby girl named Sophia, in rather unclear circumstances. At some point, I found out that she had died in a horrible domestic accident caused by negligence. The story, no doubt, affected me greatly, and unable to conceive of a more dreadful image, I used the one of the stroller tumbling down the giant staircase. Somehow, my family was traveling in that stroller. That was the ship that was bringing my family from Odessa.

Guillermo Kuitca, Everything, Paintings and works on paper, 1980 – 2008, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum, Miami Art Museum, Scala ed. 2008, p.77