Nancy Margolis Gallery is pleased to announce Gina Ruggeri’s first solo exhibition is to open April 28 and continue through June 4.

Ruggeri’s exhibition consists of two distinct but interrelated bodies of work in painting and drawing. Her subject is form, imagined in three dimensions like a sculptor’s vision. Depictions of raw materials such as clay, stone and wood are subjected to deformations by natural and man made processes. In many of her images, wholes break into parts, and particles dissolve into air. Slow decay, sudden cataclysm, and violent gestures transform everyday matter, underscoring its fragility and evanescence.

In her cut-out paintings on Mylar, iconic illusionary forms invade the gallery and subsume its space into their fictions. Their thin Trompe-l’oeil silhouettes merge seamlessly with the wall’s surface, transforming and destabilizing its solidity. Uncanny three-dimensional forms appear to float in atmosphere, while abscesses seem to erode the wall itself by carving out negative space.

Drawings conjure another aspect of her vision. Rugged geometries of raw material are held in precarious balance, while destructive gestures accelerate natural forces of erosion and decay. Drawn rapidly with fluid line, their graphic simplicity forms a conceptual counterpoint to the Mylar paintings’ crystalline detail.

Gina Ruggeri’s recent exhibitions include a solo project at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2010. Her awards include a 2010-2011 grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a 2008 NYFA fellowship in Painting. Gina Ruggeri received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She teaches at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY and lives and works in Brooklyn.