gabriel kuri: your cost-benefit calculations

"The form of a folded umbrella: rolled and compact, always cumbersome and passive. Indifferent. When it rains, it stretches outward into radial tension, becoming a shelter from a fact. But that feels too easy. The less obvious: not the shelter for the when, but the latent form of the if. To forge this form, to find its concrete shape, is what compels me to make art." - Gabriel Kuri

your cost-benefit calculations, Gabriel Kuri’s first solo exhibition at kurimanzutto, New York, presents a new body of work that considers how probability might take material form. The title evokes a phrase that guides countless daily decisions—choices shaped by instinct as much as reason—and the subtle assessments through which risk, chance, and prediction become means for imagining possible futures. Through folded steel forms, soft textiles, volcanic rocks, carved wooden poles or consumer articles, Kuri asks how such abstract operations could manifest concretely, and how materials might speak the language of odds.

The exhibition is organized through a chromatic system that echoes the familiar color-coding of risk assessment charts, conventions that are widely used yet ultimately arbitrary: cool greens and blues suggest low risk, while oranges and reds signal heightened stakes. This gradient structures the distribution of works throughout the gallery and offers associative cues in place of quantifiable data, guiding perception without fixing interpretation.

Three large metal sculptures anchor the exhibition. Each consists of a cool-toned steel plane folded where it leans on volcanic rock or stacked fireworks. These unlikely pairings merge geometry with geological time and latent potential—for eruption, combustion, celebration. As Kuri notes, “all materials, no matter how raw they appear… are socially branded and coded.” Each material carries cultural associations and stored energies, which he renders newly legible. The sculptures could also read as bodies, balancing on what might be noses or elbows, held in precariously stable positions from which the outcome could shift.

Surrounding these works are familiar forms enlarged or stripped of function. Two-headed matches, scorched across their midpoint, remain faithful to the chromatic logic of the exhibition: one end follows the cool palette while the other extends into warmer hues and variable lengths, revealing the tenuous frameworks we rely on to measure the future.

Nearby, circular forms stacked in threes are paired with eggs and conch shells, placing the organic and fabricated on shared ground. They could sit on the floor, obeying the dictate of gravity, but here they appear affixed to the wall, projecting toward the viewer. In this shift of orientation, the eggs seem to resist weight altogether and the conch shells gesture toward the ear. No longer felt merely as objects, they might also start to register as diagrams. Their juxtapositions nod to the Surrealist pleasure in unlikely pairings and the unforeseen associations they spark.

Along one wall, carved wooden poles suggest elusive instruments of measurement. Their surfaces are incised with units such as dashes, circles, commas, and letters. Finished in a creamy matte polish reminiscent of chopsticks, they convey information through form even when no conventional metric is legible. Their ambiguity invites questions about what defines a material: its past, its intended role, or its possible use.

Hung and folded at different angles, the textile works are reminiscent of the pliant geometries of umbrellas. These octagonal canopies appear as truncated forms: partial shelters or oblique covers that may embody the chance of precipitation. Set against the possibilities of eruption or combustion present elsewhere in the exhibition, all these works evoke phenomena that can be measured yet never fully predicted. Nearby, circular volumetric sculptures echo these radial forms, suggesting three-dimensional charts that resist legibility. 

The exhibition implies that life unfolds through continuous transactions, wagers, and negotiations: our own ongoing cost-benefit calculations. Here, probability is not a percentage but a sculptural potential, and form becomes the place where chance takes shape.