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15/12/2006

Gabriel Kuri

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth

And thanks in advance

The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is pleased to present 2006 International Artist in Residence Gabriel Kuri in his first exhibition in Aotearoa New Zealand, and thanks in advance.

Mexican-born Belgium-based Kuri is internationally recognised for a practice that embraces sculpture, installation, drawing and photography. Kuri places personal observations of everyday life into the terrain of formal aesthetics, resulting in witty and poetic works that challenge how we look at the world around us. In his precise articulation of the grammar of the everyday, Kuri examines and decodes experience, working with a variety of materials and situations from daily life that take on symbolic meanings. The appearance and form of Kuri’s objects is at odds with the stories they have to tell, relying on language games and twisted semantics, artifice and illusion.

Curated by Govett-Brewster Curator of Contemporary Art Mercedes Vicente, and thanks in advance features new works developed during Kuri’s residency. These speak of his experience living in New Plymouth with its circumstantial and material specificity. Incidents, idioms and the transaction and circulation of goods acquire new significance, turning into incongruous juxtapositions and dislocations of common objects that elude logic. Shifting between the readymade found object and the sculpturally built, Kuri’s work presents dialectical pairings of natural elements (moss, stones) and manufactured components (children toys, till receipts, roofing and construction materials).

Archetypes of a place or an experience take allegorical meanings; Mount Taranaki in the New Plymouth region appears both as a local icon and a symbol of a partially occluded reality, the anchor theme for this exhibition. Likewise, the title, and thanks in advance, enunciates a conclusion of what has not yet taken place. It represents both the enabling and limiting communicative power of language and ultimately Kuri’s belief in the eloquence of what is omitted. Another recurrent conceptual framework in his oeuvre is time, both the passing of time as a process and as the index of a precise instant. Here it surfaces in the exact time of the commercial transaction imprinted on a till receipt and in the receipts accumulated daily leading up to and during the course of his residency.

A graduate of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the University of Mexico City and Goldsmiths College, London, Kuri has exhibited widely in Europe and the Americas. His work is held in private and public collections throughout the world including Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Coleccin Jumex in Mexico City.

A bilingual (English/Spanish) catalogue documenting the exhibition and featuring essays by Marcella Beccaria, Curator, Castello di Rivoli, and Mercedes Vicente is planned for February. This residency is in partnership with the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki (WITT) and supported by Creative New Zealand.

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Private Bag 2025, New Plymouth - Aotearoa New Zealand

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