Gabriel Kuri, Quick Standards

Gabriel Kuri
Quick Standards
2006
Aluminum emergency blankets taped on wooden sticks
Dimensions variable

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist from APT

About the Artwork

In Quick Standards (2006), long wooden sticks and silver emergency aluminum blankets are assembled together in order to acquire the appearance of political protest signs. Through this arrangement, the piece becomes an archetypal example of Gabriel Kuri’s oeuvre. Working in a range of media that includes sculptures, installations, photographs and collages, the Mexican artist is renowned for the recombination of everyday objects and materials by which they are deprived of their usual function and given a new meaning. 

Quick Standards is also characteristic of Kuri’s taste for the contrasting qualities of the materials employed in his works: “The pairing of hard and soft has been an ongoing and important aspect in my work. It’s not just in the tactile sense, but also because I like to think of some of the sources of my work as being ‘hard’, as in hard facts, and others as being ‘soft’ as in being contingent." Kuri’s sculptures are thus as much an investigation on the way we interact with our surroundings as a challenge to the conventional standards of the medium. As the artist has explained, "art is an arena of potential.”

About the Artist

Born in 1970 in Mexico City, Gabriel Kuri currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his Graduate in Visual Art from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas U.N.A.M., Mexico City in 1992 and his MA from Goldsmiths College University of London in 1995.

Kuri’s most important recent exhibitions include With personal thanks to their contractual thingness, The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2014-15); All probability resolves into form, The Common Guild, Glasgow, Scotland (2014); Bottled water branded water, Parc Saint Leger-Centre d'art contemporain, Pougues-les-Eaux, France (2013-14); Gabriel Kuri, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2012); Nobody Needs to Know the Price of Your Saab, The ICA Boston, Boston (2011), travelled from The Blaffer Art Museum of the University of Houston, Houston (2010); Soft Information in your Hard Facts, Museion-Museo de Arte Moderna, Bolzano, Italy (2010); Join the Dots and Make a Point, Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2010), travelled to Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany (2010).

Kuri’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such us as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA (2014); The Modern, Fort Worth, Texas (2013); The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, (2012); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2010); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); MUHKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp (2009); MUAC, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2008); New Museum, New York (2007); REDCAT (The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2006) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2004).

Many public institutions around the world hold works by Kuri including CAC Malaga, Malaga Centre Pompidou, Paris, FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Tate Modern, London, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis