MEXICO CITY.- On view until October 15, 2023, at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Gabriel Kuri: Forecast, is the first institutional survey show in Mexico of one of the most renowned Mexican artists of his generation. The show presents more than 50 new and existing works, including three new pieces, as well as works produced primarily over the last 10 years. Each of the artworks have resulted from the artist’s studio practice, collaborations with artisans, industrial processes, and site-specific projects that respond to the immediacy of the environment.

Curated by Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds, the exhibition is centered around the idea of art as a forecast. Works of art may be interpreted as registers for experience and Kuri considers his work to have the capacity to provide information that may predict and imagine what is to come. Kuri’s works often contain references to predictive models drawn from various fields, including behavioral economics, meteorology, vulcanology, product testing, and the credit system.

“Kuri’s work signals an engagement with the contemporary world where the ideals of the modern, 20th century world, have turned somewhat surreal,” said Hammonds. “His interests lie in the rational systems derived from the experiences that organize societies. Therefore, he insists on notions such as exchange value, function, speculation, and risk evaluation having sculptural value. Kuri represents these invisible yet significant forces of the contemporary moment in his artistic production by navigating between signs and objects, affect and effect, psychological impulses, and rational systems, which in turn create a relationship between his work and the legacy of surrealism and formal modernism.”

Entitled Forecast, the exhibition shares its name with a new installation created for Museo Jumex. In Forecast (2023), banking and credit card signs hang in the museum’s glazed terrace as if displayed in a large vitrine. They become part of the landscape, one that has deferred all value to be repaid at an unspecified time in the future. However, hanging between the ephemeral nature of credit and ATMs, there is an anomaly: a plastic bag filled with water that gives the impression of a mundane deadweight.

Installed across from and in confrontation with Forecast is a drawing by Mexican painter and polymath, Dr. Atl, Explosión paricutínea [Paricutineal Explosion] (2007), selected by Kuri for the exhibition. The drawing is a preparatory sketch that includes diagrams for the geological movements and magma flows, a testament to the modern painter’s interest in vulcanology beneath the landscape. Together Kuri’s installation and the Dr. Atl drawing form keystones for this exhibition where what is represented are dynamic plays of forces, often in opposition, rather than the representation of the visible.

Works created specifically for Museo Jumex also include hard credit soft guarantee (2023). Inspired by an investigation into the calculations of installment plans, a series of plastic-wrapped mattresses stand against a wall, each with similar signs that do not promote sales but dissect the economic balance and risk that allows for the utilitarian and intimate object to be sold with a down-payment for immediate use. The calculations spill onto the wall and absences in the design signal that mattresses have been moved. The third new work, preemptive forms (2023) is a large-scale metal sculpture that explores weight and balance.

GABRIEL KURI (MEXICO 1970)

Gabriel Kuri’s work directly engages form and material to explore notions of function, systems of exchange, ordering principles and the coding of direct experience into socially convened protocols. By focusing on the objects and spaces that mediate human relationships, Kuri draws attention to and questions the tenets of contemporary culture.

His practice is rooted in firsthand physical experience, while his approach to making follows a variety of techniques and gestures that encompass the direct forging of materials, collaborative production with craftspeople, industrial processes, and the incorporation of ready-made objects in a non-hierarchical sculptural investigation. Thus, the residues of human interactions are brought together with industrial materials in sculptures, collages and installations that make a study of the history of consumption. Kuri completed a BFA at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) UNAM, Mexico (1988-92) and an MFA at Goldsmith’s College University of London (1993-95); with an important part of his artistic formation taking place on Fridays at Gabriel Orozco’s studio between 1987 and 1990, together with Abraham Cruzvillegas, Damián Ortega, and Dr. Lakra.

Notable solo exhibitions include Gabriel Kuri, Aranya Art Center, Beidaihe, CH (2023),
Gabriel Kuri: Sorted, Resorted, Wiels Contemporary Arts Center, Brussels, BE (2019),

Product Testing Unit, Alte Fabrik, Rapperswil-Jona, CH (2016), Gabriel Kuri: with personal thanks to their contractual thingness, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2015), Bottled water branded water, Parc Saint Leger-Centre d’art contemporain, Pougues-les-Eaux, FR (2013), Nobody Needs to Know the Price of Your Saab, The ICA, Boston, USA (2011), and more.