LONDON—Architectural plans, city grids, topographic charts, road maps, seating charts — since 1974, when, as a precocious teenager, he had his debut at Buenos Aires’s Galeria Lirolay, Guillermo Kuitca has made paintings that reference diagrams of space. For his latest exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London, through November 8, the Argentine artist continues in this vein, drawing upon classic 20th-century paintings caught up in modernism’s battle between flatness and depth.

In 12 large-scale oils — some more than 12 feet long — and nine smaller works on paper, Kuitca revisits two celebrated moments in modernist painting: the analytic Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which radically re-imagined the two-dimensional picture plane, and the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana, which literally opened up that surface, exposing the three-dimensionality of canvas, stretcher, and paint. With overlapping, collapsed planes, gridlike structures, and trompe l’oeil cuts of canvas, Kuitca pays homage to these forebears, but he also riffs on their iconic examples; his idea seems to be to carve out a space for painting today. Kuitca’s careful meditations are notable for their squiggles, erasures, bursts of vivid color, and light-hearted motifs (a Warhol-esque banana, a boxy female comic figure). It’s as if he’s trying to counter the somber, self-conscious, and at times violent historical works that constitute his point of departure with irony, playfulness, and a bit of mischief.

While in London to install his show at Hauser & Wirth, Kuitca saw as much theater as art, which is not surprising given that he’s done a series on seating arrangements in famous performance spaces, designed sets for theater and opera, and directed plays. Below are his picks for the weekend in London:

1. Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello, at the Gielgud Theatre

“At first, I wasn’t too excited about going to see such a classic work, especially since I’ve seen it several times before. I’m not all that interested in the play’s central theme of fiction versus reality; it’s a subject that seems exhausted, and I’m not sure there’s room to say anything new about it. But for some reason this performance, because of its exaggeration, its vulgarity (not in the sense that something on TV is vulgar, but rather in terms of its obviousness), and its over-the-topness made the subject quite interesting and took it to a whole new level. There’s a moment when the author gets trapped in the theater and has to go to the theater next door, where Les Misérables is playing. It’s really fantastic. Even if you aren’t interested in these themes, the production is super compelling visually, and the acting is great.”

2. Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter at the Cinema Haymarket, through November 16

“This play’s first act is a bit of a reverse of Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo. Instead of the actors coming out from the screen into reality, here they go from the theater into the movies. That was ok, but I don’t think you can build much out of the gimmick of passing from one medium into another. The second act is more dramatic, and I liked it much better than the first.”

3. Rothko at Tate Modern, through February 1, 2009

“This is a fantastic show, full of beautiful paintings, and it’s really great to see many of them together. But I was disappointed in the last room, with the black and gray paintings, where there appears to be some overlapping between fiction and reality. You could say that Rothko’s life (and imminent death) was the reality and his painting was the fiction; or it could be the reverse — regardless, I don’t think they match. In general, I don’t believe you can find clues about a person’s biography by looking at their art, but somehow in that final gallery something in me kept trying to mix biography and aesthetics, like I was looking for clues in those paintings about the artist’s tragic suicide. It’s not a curatorial problem — at no point does the curator suggest that these clues exist. But I was annoyed in there. I kept wondering whether I could see what was going to happen to Rothko after he made those paintings.”