Introduction

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 color, 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 characterized by a conscious positioning and a surprising casualness at the same time. With their vast lightness and humor, 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.