Guillermo Kuitca is best known as a painter and director of theater productions. For the Opera House at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, he designed the stage curtain, two panels 67 feet wide and 40 feet in height. Of this project, he spoke of the curtain before a performance, having its own 'moment.' He said: "The curtain reminds us of where we are. When it is lifted, we are no longer there." (Dreishpoon 155).

The drawings, titled Dallas Suite, were completed on letter-size sheets of paper, and exhibited as part of a 2009 retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Miami Art Museum.

Kuitca was born in 1961 in Argentina, and by the age of thirteen was already showing his artwork to the public. In addition to painting, he became enamored of theatre design and saw the potential of combining it with painting when he collaborated with Carlos Ianni, a Director and good friend.

Kuitca traveled to Europe in 1980, and won numerous awards for his artistic achievements in his home country. In the 1980s, he started incorporating domestic images into his paintings.

His use of recurring objects such as beds, tables, chairs and small objects convey his emotional connection to childhood and feelings of insecurity, isolation and turmoil. In the 1980s when he directed experimental theater production, often the same images from his paintings using small furniture appeared in a large stage-like setting.

He began making his first paintings of maps in 1987. He used the maps for their abstract qualities not concerned with the map locale. He later used mattresses as canvases for his map paintings, reintroducing that dominant theme from earlier works.


Sources:
Douglas Dreishpoon, "Portfolio: Guillermo Kuitca, Drawing the Curtain," Art in America, pp. 150-155

Editors, "Reviews,"Art in America, 11/2002, p. 152