kurimanzutto

For more than three decades, Cuevas’s practice has been rooted in research-based projects concerned with economic and environmental issues and their socio-political impact. On this occasion, Cuevas will exhibit large-scale wall reliefs especially conceived for the New York context. The reliefs at kurimanzutto are informed by the Mexico City-based artist’s meticulous preparatory research into pre-Hispanic symbology and the history of relationships between oil and wealth management companies. The resulting pieces combine representations of pre-Hispanic gods and goddesses along with corporate logos. An earlier relief work entitled The Enterprise (2019) is on display at Museum Ludwig in Cologne until November 2024. A series of sculptures, which were recently exhibited in Cuevas’s exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, are also on view in the gallery. They combine the heads of animal figures Cuevas found and 3D scanned at Mexico’s famed Museo Nacional de Antropología with vintage motor oil drums collected by the artist.

The inaugural exhibition includes work by 39 artists. Like so many important decisions in the gallery’s history, the exhibition, and the space itself, emerged from a series of conversations with its artists. kurimanzutto’s origins lie in such exchanges; it was Gabriel Orozco who first conceived the gallery with Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri in the late 1990s. It was input from the artists that led to the decision to open in Chelsea and many details of the new location’s layout and exhibition spaces are the direct result of input from Orozco and Rikrit Tiravinija. Design elements by the artists can be found throughout the space: tiles by Dr. Lakra, lamps by Janette Laverrière, which Nairy Baghramian has installed in dialogue with her work in past exhibitions, textiles found in the work of Danh Vo, and a reception area designed by Gabriel Sierra.  Damián Ortega greatly contributed to the inception of TODOS JUNTOS (All Together). Ortega, along with Leonor Antunes, Tarek Atoui, Nairy Baghramian, and Haegue Yang, to name only a few, imagined an exhibition that could tell a visual story of kurimanzutto and its community. The title is borrowed from a 2014 work by Tiravanija of the same name that was first shown at the gallery in Mexico City. Creating a new iteration for the show, Tiravanija presents a painted newspaper from July 12, 2022, when the most detailed photographs of the universe, taken by the James Webb telescope, were released. For Tiravanija, the scale and expanse of these images are ultimately profoundly inclusive.

Roberto Gil de Montes tests and challenges perceptions of background and foreground, an enveloping blue and green landscape that invites us to see the successive layers of narrative overlaid on a single, idiosyncratic setting. The sea engulfs but also delivers and surrenders its fish and its stories for the extraction of the figures that populate this landscape in a visual idiom of color, receptivity and interaction. With the translucent layering of elements across surfaces and across figures – the veil, the moving shoreline, the water itself – the artist reinstates an equivocation to the oneiric lucidity of some of the scenes, adhering with characteristic fidelity to a reverence for that which remains indeterminate, spontaneous, partial or unspoken. Is a rescue just another form of capture? And in embracing visible forms of ambiguity - wearing a mask, standing in water, hanging upside down or posing behind a veil - do we, in fact, offer up the most explicit renditions of ourselves?

kurimanzutto presents works by Gabriel Orozco anchored in the artist’s experimentations with planar boundaries, material interactions, and color, the series continue his ongoing analysis of the circle within nature. Orozco began the works “Folding Stamps” and “Folding Flags”, defining the outward spiraling of linear creases in paper, as expansions within an exploration of geometry. Orozco accents these paper creases with gouache, which he then presses between folds, transferring pigments from one side to another. Through the layering and erosion of transparent and opaque materials, Orozco plays with assemblage, texture, line, and depth, creating richly tactile works that are imbued with a sculptural quality. The artist is committed to a "dual commitment to symmetry and concentricity," as Briony Fer reminds us. The series are extended meditations from Orozco that represents the first of a two part show of Orozco’s work at kurimanzutto.