GABRIEL KURI: YOUR COST-BENEFIT CALCULATIONS
KURIMANZUTTO at New York announce Gabriel Kuri’s first solo exhibition at the gallery titled your cost-benefit calculations.
January 15 - February 28, 2026
The exhibition presents a new body of work that considers how probability might take material form. The title evokes a phrase that guides countless daily decisions—choices shaped by instinct as much as reason—and the subtle assessments through which risk, chance, and prediction become means for imagining possible futures. Through folded steel forms, soft textiles, volcanic rocks, carved wooden poles or consumer articles, Kuri asks how such abstract operations could manifest concretely, and how materials might speak the language of odds.”
The exhibition is organized through a chromatic system that echoes the familiar color-coding of risk assessment charts, conventions that are widely used yet ultimately arbitrary: cool greens and blues suggest low risk, while oranges and reds signal heightened stakes. This gradient structures the distribution of works throughout the gallery and offers associative cues in place of quantifiable data, guiding perception without fixing interpretation.
Three large metal sculptures anchor the exhibition. Surrounding these works are familiar forms enlarged or stripped of function. Nearby, circular forms stacked in threes are paired with eggs and conch shells, placing the organic and fabricated on shared ground. In this shift of orientation, the eggs seem to resist weight altogether and the conch shells gesture toward the ear. No longer felt merely as objects, they might also start to register as diagrams. Their juxtapositions nod to the Surrealist pleasure in unlikely pairings and the unforeseen associations they spark.
Along one wall, carved wooden poles suggest elusive instruments of measurement. Hung and folded at different angles, the textile works are reminiscent of the pliant geometries of umbrellas. Set against the possibilities of eruption or combustion present elsewhere in the exhibition, all these works evoke phenomena that can be measured yet never fully predicted.
The exhibition implies that life unfolds through continuous transactions, wagers, and negotiations: our own ongoing cost-benefit calculations. Here, probability is not a percentage but a sculptural potential, and form becomes the place where chance takes shape.