The most recent collaboration between Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri and British artist, Liam Gillick. This exhibition is the result of an ongoing dialogue and provides an opportunity to witness the overlaps and resonances within their work.
Gabriel Kuri and Liam Gillick
kurimanzutto is pleased to present por favor gracias de nada, the most
recent collaboration between Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri and British
artist, Liam Gillick. Running from 3 to 26 April in Mexico City, the
exhibition will be located in a shop taken over for the project.
This exhibition is the result of an ongoing dialogue and provides an
opportunity to witness the overlaps and resonances within their work.
Kuri continues to work with habitual systems, constructing oppositions
that both operate together while systematically serving to cancel each
other out. Thank you, no thank you (at present a nickname rather than a
title for this new work), is a continuation of Kuri's most recent
practice, and consists of two separate groupings of collected plastic
shopping bags, each attached to and inflated by a pivoting fan. Kuri has
choreographed the movement between the two to allow them to both meet and
miss each other at different points on their journey.
Kuri's second work finds items of his clothing, dry-cleaned and pressed,
preserved firstly by their protective plastic sleeves, and then in a
refrigerator. The dichotomy created by Kuri's clashing plastic bags is a
device repeated in this work, but this time by acknowledging the cyclical
processes of heating and chilling, which can be viewed as metaphors for
recurring moments, actions and events which do not normally or necessarily
overlap.
Gillick has created two new works for the exhibition, 'Discussion Corral'
and 'Liquid Renovation', which develop the rhetoric behind his Think
Tanks, Platforms and Screens, gridded structures made from brightly
coloured Plexiglas and aluminium. Operating somewhere between
architecture, design and sculpture, these works ask us to negotiate space,
thereby creating the potential for new or unexpected social encounters.
Gillick's new works are more open structures than his recent works, and
abandon the use of multi-coloured Plexiglas. Instead they favour the
painting of the gridded aluminium frame, leaving a more permeable
structure, which can also be entered from one side.
Both artists are interested in systems of operation and offer spaces for
discussion which are not prescribed, and are often deliberately confused,
pushing us to reassess the social space we inhabit. While the systems used
in Gillick's case exist substantially in parallel structures, like his
texts, in Kuri's case they are concealed within the object, and look
little further than to their materiality for their meaning. While each
artist has produced separate works for this exhibition, they will
collaborate on a site-specific work which draws on both their practices
and recognizes the siting of the exhibition in this unconventional and
short-lived setting.
The artists' first collaboration, involving just the two if them, was the
project 'Everyday Holiday' at Le Magasin, Grenoble (1996), which created a
yearly calendar of events and special occasions based on following but
altering local customs, Saint Day celebrations and commemorations. They
also worked together with others on the exhibition 'Dedallic Convention'
at MAK, Vienna (2001), a hypothetical convention which examined modes of
improvisation. Kuri was also designated one of the supervisors for 'The
Trial of Pol Pot' (1998), a Phillippe Parreno and Liam Gillick project at
Le Magasin, which assessed the tangible and the mythical within the
enigmas behind this architect of genocide.
Liam Gillick, born in 1964, lives and works in London and New York.
Studied at Hertfordshire College of Art (1983-4) and Goldsmiths' College,
London (1984-7). He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2002,
following his major institutional exhibition 'The Wood Way' at Whitechapel
Art Gallery, London and his presentation of 'Annlee You Proposes' at Tate
Britain. His work was featured in Dokumenta X, 1997. His vast exhibition
record includes solo shows at Le Consortium Dijon, Kunstverein Munster,
Arnolfini Bristol, Kunstverein Frankfurt and most recently, at Schipper &
Krome, Berlin, and Max Hetzler, Cologne, both in 2003.
Gabriel Kuri, born in 1970, lives and works in Mexico City. Studied at
Escuela National de Artes Plasticas, Mexico (1988-92) and Goldsmiths'
College, London (1993-95). He has presented solo exhibitions in Mexico at
Museo de las Artes de Guadalajara (1999), Sala 7 at Museo Rufino Tamayo
(2001), and most recently at Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York (2002). He has
also exhibited widely in international group shows including Sonsbeek 9
(2001), MAK, Vienna (2001), 'Age of Influence' Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago (2000), and in 'New Sitings. Contemporary Projects 4' at LACMA
(2000). He will present an outdoor project in the Venice Biennale in 2003.
kurimanzutto
Feria de Av. Revolucion y Mixcoac
Mexico City
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