GABRIEL KURI IN ARANYA ART CENTER

A sculptor at heart, Gabriel Kuri is celebrated for his dexterity, precision, and wit in convincingly forging unexpected unions between diverse materials. From found objects to collected or repurposed items, Kuri consistently directs our attention to the easily neglected detritus of the everyday. Cigarette butts, receipts, doorstops, and metal sheets become emblems of capitalist and consumer society. For the artist, there are no strictly “natural” materials. Every object is imbued with information and signification. Kuri extracts from these items coded meanings and hidden values, such as risk, luck, speculation, and emergency, filtered through the lens of commerce and modern economics.

Materials are converted into forms, reminiscent of and renewing our understandings of art historical movements like Minimalism, Arte Povera, and New Generation Sculpture. Kuri’s artistic strategy employs a system of rational structures and categorization, inspired from such industrial organizational schemes as the directory board, Take-a-Number tickets, punch cards, as well as corporate charts and graphics. Through such an intellectually rigorous approach, the artist strives to comprehend and unearth the inner mechanisms and operating patterns of the real world.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, director of Aranya Art Center and curatorial assistant Wang Jiaming.

Gabriel Kuri’s practice employs the use of the everyday. By weaving forms forged and manipulated by his hand, along with found objects, Kuri investigates rational structures of value, function and exchange. Interested in numerical categorisation, both in economic and hierarchical structures, Kuri filters and extracts visual and linguistic value through a process of physical construction and conceptual selection, with the objective of understanding the present world.

Gabriel Kuri was born in 1970 in Mexico City and currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Recent solo exhibitions include sorted, resorted, WIELS, Brussels (2019); with personal thanks to their contractual thingness, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2014); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2012); Before Contingency After the Fact, South London Gallery, London (2011); nobody needs to know the price of your saab, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); join the dots and make a point, Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2010).