from the archive - gabriel kuri

On the occasion of your cost-benefit calculations, Gabriel Kuri’s first exhibition at kurimanzutto, New York, From the Archive revisits a selection of exhibitions from his three-decade career. Rather than following a linear chronology, this edition brings together projects through recurring concerns that structure his practice: the systems that order experience, material tensions, the residues of exchange, and the mechanisms of prediction that shape our sense of the future. These are not fixed categories but provisional frameworks through which Kuri continually renegotiates objects and ideas. What emerges is a circulation of thought—like the receipts, volcanic rocks, shells, and everyday materials that move through his sculptures—rendering value, classification, and anticipation tangible in material form.

Across these relocations, Kuri’s work remains attentive to how economic, bureaucratic, and predictive systems structure everyday life—and how materials can make those structures tangible. Over the past three decades, he has repurposed found objects, juxtaposed consumer goods with abstract or weathered forms, enlarged and recast familiar shapes, and worked with both craftspeople and industrial fabrication. These strategies coexist within a non-hierarchical approach that treats sculpture as an open-ended discipline for engaging critically with the material world.

This inquiry has led him to work with the material traces left behind by economic transactions: receipts, tickets, plastic bags, even loose change that registers consumption. With this focus, his 2014 solo exhibition with personal thanks to their contractual thingness at the Aspen Art Museum gathered works that explore how transactions mediate and shape human interactions. Kuri isolates and reconfigures these everyday remnants of exchange, treating them not as inert data but as evidence of lived experience. This becomes tangible in the series of sculptures exhibited at Aspen, which he has produced since 2001, where he selects ephemeral tickets, vouchers, and receipts from his own movements—those that mark particular moments, locations, and expenditures—and translates them into handwoven wool gobelins. Through this slow, labor-intensive process, these fragile pieces of paper are transformed into lasting forms, prompting reflection on how transactions function as a form of biographical and economic portraiture, turning private movements and life choices into objects that circulate publicly as art.

The semi-transparent structure was punctuated with coins, cigarette butts, and moths—residues of human interactions and life, gathered in a grid of wooden frames. Smoke drawings that traversed the gallery walls were produced by burning sheets of paper printed with figures and charts relating to the logistics of the structural intervention and its projected savings. Enlarged matchsticks, coins and “error bars” translated statistical uncertainty into sculptural form. In both iterations, the exhibition functioned as a self-reflective proposition: a museum examining its architecture, costs, and the infrastructures of energy and labor on which it depends.

Contrast and juxtaposition are key principles in many of Kuri’s works, as is a dialectical structure in which opposing forces generate new meaning. As seen in earlier works where soft coats and bags negotiated with his metal structures, these tensions recur throughout his practice: heavy and light, hard and soft, durable and ephemeral. This sculptural language, grounded in the friction between disparate materials, came into focus in his presentation at ILLUMInations, the 54th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale curated by Bice Curiger in 2011. Within the Giardini, Kuri staged calculated pairings: bamboo poles balanced on a crushed Coca-Cola can, held between floor and ceiling; two boulders hung on the wall, improbably supported by three balled-up socks. These juxtapositions nod to Surrealist strategies of unlikely encounter, yet their force lies less in visual surprise than in the way materials accrue meaning through their physical and cultural associations.

This premise underpinned his 2014 solo exhibition at The Common Guild in Glasgow, All probability resolves into form, where he turned to the architectures of disaster shelters and polling stations—provisional structures that condense questions of governance, aid, and collective vulnerability. Taking voting booths and relief centers as points of departure, his sculptures examined how materials operate within specific political and economic frameworks. A public call for basic necessities—blankets, sleeping bags, bottled water, toiletries—brought donated items into the gallery alongside elements fabricated in his studio.

The installation that lent the exhibition its title, Forecast (2023), occupied the museum’s glazed terrace like a suspended commercial vitrine. Banking and credit card signs hung as in a shop window, their text erased so that only logos remained: abstract constellations of circles and stars. These symbols retained the aesthetics of corporate branding while aligning the credit system’s promise of deferred prosperity with astrology’s search for omens. Among them hung a plastic bag filled with water, borrowed from everyday markets in Mexico and reputed to repel flies. Positioned alongside the language of finance, it introduced a vernacular logic of belief into a space governed by calculation, suggesting that minor gestures and informal knowledge persist within—and can subtly unsettle—the economic systems that claim to forecast the future. Kuri’s turn to forecasting extends his longstanding inquiry into how we navigate such structures, weighing possible scenarios to anticipate or negotiate the systems that organize collective life.