Gabriel Kuri

Over the past decade, Gabriel Kuri (born 1970) has been ransacking the paradoxes of material consumption, extracting both visual and linguistic value from the tracking systems and trivial marketing mechanisms that fill our daily lives. Playing with the principles of minimalism and the history of consumption, he integrates elements of everyday life into sculptures and collages. 

This catalogue documents the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston presentation of Gabriel Kuri: Nobody Needs To Know The Price Of Your Saab, the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States. Alternatively described as a “unique accountant” and a “poetic activist,” Kuri raises questions about the ways we represent information and the objects to which we assign value. A conventional, color-coded pie chart is re-imagined as a series of three-dimensional, interlocking bins, literally stuffed with the materials it has been created to quantify. Disposable items are recast as bits of personal biography, as Kuri transforms rows of tiny hotel shampoo bottles into a visual tally of time spent on the road. Other works explore the relationship between consumerism and the art world, such as a lowly grocery store receipt elevated into an exquisite, hand-woven tapestry of monumental scale.