Kuri’s work attempts to expose our relationship to the tangible things we take for granted and our relationship to the actions associated with them. Warhol designed his entire career around tossing the American consumerist condition in the face of the people who contributed to it and, more importantly, to those who funded it. Materialism is no stranger to Americans or to the American art conscious. For Kuri, however, the approach to art making was far more concerned with readymade and found materials and the ensuing relationships to society and culture that followed. For much of the late 80s and early 90s, Kuri was active in the workshop of Orozco, where the seeds of Post-Minimalism were sewn many times over. The Jumex Collection, considered to be the largest private collection of contemporary art in Latin America, features work by such artists as Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, and famed Mexican stars like Gabriel Orozco and Kuri himself.
Dynamic Mexican art that embraces non-traditional materials and methods, inspired by conceptualism and globalization, has enjoyed an international impact due in large part to the participation of Eugenio López Alonso, the 39-yearold heir to the Jumex fortune.
Kuri belongs to a generation of young, up-and-coming Mexican artists who in recent years have garnered a fairly decent amount of international attention in the wake of the success of other Mexican artists like Miguel Calderón, Daniel Guzmán, and Francis Alÿs as well as the recent international spotlight on Mexico City as one of the art world’s new hotspots. It was Jean Baudrillard who said, “It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.” Such is the case with the work of Mexican contemporary artist Gabriel Kuri, whose recent body of work accentuates the existence of the insignificant and the excessivity of consumerism, temporality, and post-modern culture in the face of the mundane.
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