KUMUKUMU is proud to present its second special project, Figment, curated by Florence Uchida and featuring the works of Gina Ruggeri and Rob Wynne.

Gina Ruggeri’s cut-out paintings on Mylar evoke striking illusions that interact with architectural space. Attached flush to the wall and only a few millimeters thick, the works’ bold, emblematically flat silhouettes engage the entire body and lend a palpable, sculptural presence to their ephemeral subjects. The artist focuses her attention on mutable, immaterial forms in nature, drawn from her imagination and lushly rendered in translucent layers of acrylic paint. A plume of smoke hovers in suspended animation, while trompe l’oeil caverns and holes appear to erode the gallery walls. These idealized representations of transmutation and decay invoke thoughts of evanescence and mortality, even as they playfully flaunt their artifice as manmade constructions.

Ruggeri’s recent awards include a NYFA Fellowship in Painting (2008), and a position as artist-in-residence at the Grand Canyon North Rim (2009). In the summer of 2010, she will exhibit an installation project at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, in Ridgefield, CT. She was recently included in the group exhibition, Infinitesimal Eternity: Images Made in the Face of Spectacle, at the Yale School of Art (2009). She holds an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art, and BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She lives and works in the outer boroughs of New York City.

Rob Wynne’s work is a unique combination of baroque and decadent sensibilities and notions that take many forms from glass mushrooms and glittering beaded works on velum to fly wallpaper and printed canvases with embroidery. Wynne’s interests in faux nature and fascination with language are also realized in mirrored, glass text works made up of humorous and poignant works and phrases with distorted letters.

For Figment, Wynne will present a silver and pastel colored floor sculpture of glass mushrooms that reminds one of a magical ‘Alice in Wonderland’ hallucination. This fantastical reference to the surreal or drug induced vision can be carried on in the gold, ceramic branch with little glass eye balls protruding from it, jutting out directly from the wall.

Rob Wynne has had solo exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery as well as at the JGM gallery in Paris, and will have an upcoming show inaugurating the Gavlak Gallery’s new Worth Avenue space in Palm Beach in November of 2009. His work has been acquired by numerous institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The N.Y. Public Library, The Spencer Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as Le Fonds Regional d Art Contemporain (FRAC), France. It is also been permanently exhibited at the Dior Headquarters in Paris, and included in various group shows both in the United Stated and in Europe. Rob Wynne lives and works in New York City.