An Old Niche For Your New Need

Esther Schipper is pleased to present Gabriel Kuri’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Entitled an old niche for your new need, the exhibition will include five new stone sculptures and three large-scale glass vitrines. The custom-made vitrines recall those found in museums, in which small, precious or easily damaged objects are displayed. Kuri houses in his an assortment of specially produced objects and/or assemblies of materials collected by the artist. Each vitrine has its own theme, noticeable in scale and texture of the elements. Rendered unfamiliar and functionless, they are re-imagined as artifacts, future remnants of twenty-first century material culture.

With their adjoining curves and flat planes, the artist’s new stone sculptures combine a man-made, linear quality and one reminiscent of naturally occurring rock crevices. This tension between made and found characteristics is further emphasized by the variations of their surface texture, chiseled to degrees of varying smoothness and polished to a matt sheen in places. The stones have a totemic quality but paradoxically carry it with a hint of ironic detachment. This impression is reinforced by apparently discarded objects—such as, for example, colorful drinking straws, bent to echo the curvatures of the stones—inserted under the sculptures’ edges and in their crevices, as if visitors had used them as receptacles for illicitly depositing objects.

The addition of vestiges of human acts of consumption, such as empty bottles or cans, cigarette buts or ticket stubs, as signs of spent time, energy or currency is a recurring theme in the artist’s work.

Kuri’s oeuvre encompasses diverse media including sculpture, collage and installation, and often uses repurposed natural, industrial, and mass-produced objects to craft eloquent works of art. With his recurrent choice of objects and issues—such as consumerism, economics and temporality—he has forged a complex personal vocabulary.