Introduction

The fourth exhibition in the *KURATOR series 120%, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri’s first Swiss solo show presents both new and existing works on the theme of product testing. Kuri’s art explores society’s economic cycles, its commodities, waste products and excesses, his raw materials being consumer goods, incidental objects and disposable products, all of which he arranges to form sculptural objects.

By virtue of their function, look and feel, these materials and products act as information media that reveal something about the society in which they are used. With his sculptures, Kuri visualises the possible messages contained within the materials. The pieces thus emphasise physical characteristics such as weight, texture, flexibility, strength, transparency and degree of human and industrial processing, while Kuri’s collections of everyday found objects use organisational methods such as comparison, systematisation and classification, giving them gain unaccustomed prominence.

In Product Testing Unit, his particular focus is on materials and their durability. Kuri’s sculptures can be seen as gestures and processes that are either in flux or that suggest, by virtue of their balance or via narration, the possibility of movement in space and time. The medium of sculpture, too, plays a role, via a juxtaposition of physical properties – the light contrasting with the heavy, the artistic with the unprocessed and the manufactured – that draws attention to the sculptor’s craft.

Model for a Victory Parade comprises a moving conveyor belt carrying an aluminium energy drink can. The can is kept pressed against one edge of the belt by the latter’s movement and has to endure this situation indefinitely; the work thus sets the apparent calm of the can against the motion of the belt. What Kuri describes in the title as a “victory parade” is in fact an empty, passive, listless piece of detritus caught in a loop it cannot escape. There is a similarly unvarying quality to the piece Untitled (Three Frozen Fire Proof Voids), which features a chest freezer, formally reminiscent of minimal art’s cuboid shapes, containing three black round bins lined with velvet. Here, Kuri offers us a graphic, geometric image, with its round volumes fitted neatly into the freezer’s rectangle; at the same time, the title emphasises the situation’s absurdity.

Untitled (Charted Missing Data), meanwhile, consists of a block of stone perforated with drilled holes and placed on an industrially made steel table that calls to mind a baggage conveyor table, with inflated latex condoms inserted into the only openings on the outer edge of the stone. The contrasts inherent in the sculpture – between natural stone and stainless steel, movement and heft, hardness and softness – lend it an internal tension that results from the enduring and maintaining of these contrasting states.

For A Calculated Journey into a Calculated Experience, Kuri has assembled a pair of chairs, an Ikea table still in its box, and crockery featuring a resin and latex mock-up of a fast food meal. It represents both a temporal process and a spatial situation. The packaged, unassembled table serves as a makeshift surface, its potential form left to our imagination, while the leftover meal suggests a quick dinner that has been brought to a sudden halt. The haste evoked by the still boxed-up table and the fast food thus contrasts with the static nature of the sculptural form. On the floor and along the walls of the gallery space are smaller objects, such as wooden doorstops and bits of soap, that seem to have been numbered, systematised and catalogued, thus apparently identifying and classifying incidental objects, things we use or reach for every day.

The exhibition Product Testing Unit highlights various aspects of Gabriel Kuri’s artistic practice, offering an overview of his polymorphic sculpture that ranges from the gestural or movement-based to smaller, fragmentary observations of everyday life. Thematically linked to their constituent materials, both in terms of their physical properties and their social meanings, the works serve to illustrate the potential within the incidental.

The exhibition is curated by Christina Lehnert.