Gabriel Kuri: Nobody Needs to Know the Price of Your Saab

Blaffer Art Museum inaugurates the academic year a major exhibition featuring the internationally renowned Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri. Presented in conjunction with the celebration of the Mexican Bicentennial, Gabriel Kuri: Nobody needs to know the price of your Saab is a ten-year survey of sculptures and collages that chart our daily existence as a series of exchanges and transactions. The show is the artist's first solo exhibition organized by a U.S. museum.
 
Absorbed by questions of production and exchange, and their imprint on the cultural economies of time and space, Gabriel Kuri distils his observations of the everyday into images of subtle power that have garnered him a reputation as a "poetic activist." Over the past decade, Kuri has concentrated on making sculptures and collages that zealously rummage through the realm of material consumption. Both his objects and images are often created from the residue of monetary exchanges and the consumed goods that the artist collects on a daily basis. Kuri is a material archivist who extracts visual and linguistic value from the tracking systems, retail supplies and trivial marketing mechanisms that constitute our daily lives. He is also a spatial archivist, drawing attention to and decoding the physical spaces his work engages. His installations are carefully conceived in relation to the circumstantial codification of the site and thus engage a complex set of socioeconomic conditions specific to a particular time and place.

Gabriel Kuri lives and works in Mexico City and Brussels, Belgium. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is a graduate of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City. Kuri's recent accolades include his selection to design the visual identity for the 2011 Armory Show and his inclusion in the 2010 Frieze Projects. Following its Blaffer debut, Gabriel Kuri: Nobody needs to know the price of your Saab will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, from Feb. 3 through July 4, 2011.