Introduction

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opens Gabriel Kuri: Nobody Needs To Know The Price Of Your Saab, the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States. Using familiar materials such as receipts, newspaper or plastic bags, Kuri focuses our attention on contemporary consumer culture and the way money mediates almost all our human relationships and daily transactions. Approximately 25 sculptures and 10 collages are on view, including Untitled (Superama), one of three towering tapestries ranging from 8 to over 12 feet in height, each intricately hand-woven in Mexico to replicate Walmart receipts.

“Gabriel Kuri’s sculptures and photographs capture daily rituals, commerce, and how the passage and marks of time are reflected in overlooked objects,” said Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA. “Along with Dr. Lakra and Damián Ortega—whose work we recently introduced at the ICA—Kuri was part of an informal collective of brilliant artists that gathered at the Mexico City studio of sculptor Gabriel Orozco. This exhibition provides Boston audiences the opportunity to discover yet another powerful voice from this hub of artistic innovation.“

„What we see as merely the residue of daily life—receipts, crushed cans, slivers of soap—Gabriel Kuri sees as the stuff of sculpture, objects that track our movements through systems of economics, politics, consumption, and production,” said ICA Associate Curator Randi Hopkins, who coordinated the exhibition at the ICA.

Alternatively described as a “unique accountant” and a “poetic activist,” Kuri raises questions about the ways we represent information and the objects to which we assign value. A conventional, color-coded pie chart is re-imagined as a series of three-dimensional, interlocking bins, literally stuffed with the materials it has been created to quantify. Disposable items are recast as bits of personal biography, as Kuri transforms rows of tiny hotel shampoo bottles into a visual tally of time spent on the road. Other works explore the relationship between consumerism and the art world, such as a lowly grocery store receipt elevated into an exquisite, hand-woven tapestry of monumental scale. In the artist’s hands, works that borrow from the quantifying languages of charts, graphs, and numbers seem to become sentimental measures of time, space, and memory.