kurimanzutto

Seven years after transforming the gallery into an OXXO convenience store as part of the OROXXO project, Gabriel Orozco’s latest exhibition at kurimanzutto presents recent drawings, paintings and sculptures intricately connected to the places where he lives. The drawings in Diario de Plantas, made in notebooks small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, record the imprints and sketches of leaves to trace an open-ended cartography of organic growth. Orozco began this series in Tokyo during the COVID pandemic, documenting the leaves that caught his attention or fell at his feet; then, the diary traveled with him to Acapulco and Mexico City, where he was working on the master plan for a large public project to renovate the city’s central Chapultepec Park. From the pages of his Diario we get a glimpse of the artist’s daily practice as well as his enduring interest in landscape and the natural environment. The traces and imprints made with gouache, tempera, ink and graphite suggest deliberate improvisation, where the delicate textures and shapes of each specimen guide his exploration of organic structures and color. In some works, the minimalist compositions and the mastery of ink evoke the art of calligraphy, while others seem closer to ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints with bold outlines and vibrant color palettes. Some drawings appear as a single sheet but many of them are presented in their original format: as double page spreads in a notebook. The Diario seems to document a form of vegetal, photosynthetic language, a kind of plant-thinking that communicates with us from the botanical entanglements of each page. Taken together, they grow into their own form of breathing and writing, with and in nature.

In 1981, esteemed curator and writer Carla Stellweg invited then-Los Angeles-based artist Roberto Gil de Montes to work with her in Mexico City as a guest editor for a special issue of Artes Visuales on Chicana/o art. Born in Guadalajara, Gil de Montes immigrated to the US with his family when he was fifteen, arriving in East Los Angeles just before the 1968 Chicano blowouts erupted in protest of inequality in schools. Trained at Otis Art Institute, Gil de Montes came to identify with the Chicano movement and its artistic vanguard. He was part of a generation of Chicanx and queer artists that emerged in the 1970s that experimented voraciously with artistic genres and forms, examined the intersections of identity and cultural histories through their practice, and conceived novel modes for presenting and distributing their work. Gil de Montes profiled many of his peers and friends in the resulting magazine, including Carlos Almaraz, Elsa Flores, John Valadez, Richard Valverde, and Jack Vargas, among others. While returning to Mexico as a young artist to research Chicanx art being produced in the US may sound counter-intuitive, as identified by Gil de Montes in the magazine’s introduction, this move was beneficial:

Sánchez-Kane, who alternatively uses she and he pronouns, is interested in the deconstruction of identities and the duality of the presented self: through her clothes and sculptures, there is a perpetual tearing and fracturing of the structure, voids that seemingly shouldn’t exist, and the recurring repurposing of traditional objects through the destruction of their functionality. As an introduction to Sánchez-Kane’s practice, the foyer of the gallery will house a pop-up shop of his fashion brand with items from his latest collection. This space will serve as an interlude into the art exhibition, which will in turn showcase her sculptural practice. Many of the works on show are based on a 1920s design treaty (The Koester School Book of Drapes), which ordered that plinths or structures selling goods were transformed into fashionable and desirable vitrines. For her presentation, she has studied these techniques and transformed them into sculptures in their own right. These objects, made from tissue, resemble infinite and organic landscapes where the “desirable goods” for sale are absent. These pieces in Sánchez-Kane’s project tackle the void and the empty space that would normally be occupied by objects and bodies, both materially and metaphorically.

Carlos Amorales presents Words of Mouth and Hands, his first solo exhibition in New York at kurimanzutto. It comprises a video installation with a set of original music scores and works on paper that take as their point of departure a creation myth the artist imagined in which a serpent created the underworld by burrowing through the earth with its voice. Together, the artworks follow the transformation of the written word into choral music and the subsequent translation of music into graphic symbols. Amorales’ six-channel video installation evokes ideas of the sublime through chants. This major work portrays musician, composer, and performer Sarmen Almond singing two poems and the myth of the serpent. As a counterpoint, percussionist Diego Espinosa performs a series of dancefloor rhythms with his hands and body. In another video the hands of the artist are shown browsing through a notebook in which he developed an idiosyncratic system of signs and symbols for conducting choirs. The drawings in this notebook were inspired when seeing a choir director gesticulate with her hands, arms and body. The artist imagined these movements as drawings in the air.

On May 5th, 2023, Abraham Cruzvillegas presents his second solo project with kurimanzutto in New York City. Little Song brings together a new body of sculptural pieces created in his studio in Mexico City in the last year. His previous show, Autocontusión, was held at the gallery’s temporary project space on the Upper East Side in 2018. The new artworks integrate Cruzvillegas’s signature pink and green, a motif used by the artist since 2003. They refer to the traditional colors of Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica’s Samba school, which Abraham encountered in the Mangueira favela in Rio de Janeiro, on a pilgrimage following Oiticica’s steps.

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.

kurimanzutto is pleased to announce our summer space located at 55 Main St, East Hampton open now through September. We are delighted to join a community of galleries and participate in the continued history of art making and presentation that has taken place in the region for many decades. The gallery will have an ongoing rotation of shows every few weeks that proudly bring our artists, most never before shown in the area, out east.