Gabriel Kuri
Join the Dots and Make a Point
04 Sep - 01 Nov 2010
For the occasion of his first institutional exhibition in Germany, Gabriel Kuri (*1970 in Mexico City) has created four new groups of works, which provide an insight into different artistic aspects of his work. Accordingly, Kuri is showing sculptures and installations in the Bielefelder Kunstverein, all of them made out of found materials like industrially manufactured products, including marble, sand, paper, cigarettes or bodycare products.
Gabriel Kuri works with the mediums of installation, sculpture, collage and photography. His source material often derives from simple mass-produced objects and throwaway products. Everyday things like shopping bags or packaging, but also building material like concrete or marble surface in room-filling installations and sculptures. These are mostly liberated from their functionality, but also from the circumstances of their past, are removed form the regular cycle of consumption and preserved in the work. Alongside the fundamental aesthetic questions of material, form and colour, Kuri is concerned with reality; using lowly industrial materials is reminiscent of the artistic concepts of Minimalism, of Nouveau Réalisme or of Arte Povera.
The presentation of his objects and how they are set out in space is always characterised by a conscious positioning and a surprising casualness at the same time. With their vast lightness and humour, his works in this way level criticism at political, economic and social conditions too. In the sense of an extended notion of sculpture, he shifts the boundaries of art and the everyday, has the everyday and the viewers become part of the aesthetic form. A poetic integration distinguishing Kuri’s works arises by means of contrasting materials and forms, the combining of found objects and constructed ones and the opposing of value to valuelessness.
Gabriel Kuri lives and works in Mexico City and Brussels. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) in Mexico City and at Goldsmith College in London. With his works, he has contributed to numerous international group exhibitions, such as the 5. Berlin Biennale (2008), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007) and New Museum, New York (2007). In Germany, his works were most recently shown at the Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen, the Ludwig Forum Aachen and the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster. In addition to the Bielefelder Kunstverein and the Kunstverein Freiburg (11.06. – 08.08.2010), the Museion, Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art Bozen (05.06. – 15.08.2010) and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (28.08. – 13.11.2010) will this year mount solo exhibitions of Kuri’s works.
The exhibition with Gabriel Kuri is being mounted in cooperation with the Kunstverein Freiburg. In October Sternberg Press is publishing a German-English artist’s book with texts by Caroline Käding and Thomas Thiel. It is the first monograph on the artist to appear in Germany.
Gabriel Kuri works with the mediums of installation, sculpture, collage and photography. His source material often derives from simple mass-produced objects and throwaway products. Everyday things like shopping bags or packaging, but also building material like concrete or marble surface in room-filling installations and sculptures. These are mostly liberated from their functionality, but also from the circumstances of their past, are removed form the regular cycle of consumption and preserved in the work. Alongside the fundamental aesthetic questions of material, form and colour, Kuri is concerned with reality; using lowly industrial materials is reminiscent of the artistic concepts of Minimalism, of Nouveau Réalisme or of Arte Povera.
The presentation of his objects and how they are set out in space is always characterised by a conscious positioning and a surprising casualness at the same time. With their vast lightness and humour, his works in this way level criticism at political, economic and social conditions too. In the sense of an extended notion of sculpture, he shifts the boundaries of art and the everyday, has the everyday and the viewers become part of the aesthetic form. A poetic integration distinguishing Kuri’s works arises by means of contrasting materials and forms, the combining of found objects and constructed ones and the opposing of value to valuelessness.
Gabriel Kuri lives and works in Mexico City and Brussels. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) in Mexico City and at Goldsmith College in London. With his works, he has contributed to numerous international group exhibitions, such as the 5. Berlin Biennale (2008), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007) and New Museum, New York (2007). In Germany, his works were most recently shown at the Museum Morsbroich Leverkusen, the Ludwig Forum Aachen and the Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster. In addition to the Bielefelder Kunstverein and the Kunstverein Freiburg (11.06. – 08.08.2010), the Museion, Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art Bozen (05.06. – 15.08.2010) and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston (28.08. – 13.11.2010) will this year mount solo exhibitions of Kuri’s works.
The exhibition with Gabriel Kuri is being mounted in cooperation with the Kunstverein Freiburg. In October Sternberg Press is publishing a German-English artist’s book with texts by Caroline Käding and Thomas Thiel. It is the first monograph on the artist to appear in Germany.