Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present Movement in Three Parts, an exhibition featuring John Giorno, renowned artist, poet and innovative performer alongside newcomers Oscar Murillo, best known for his action-driven canvases-cum-installations, and Brie Ruais, whose performance-generated work takes the form of gestural, figurative and abstract ceramics.

Movement in Three Parts inaugurates Nicole Klagsbrun’s new gallery at 532 West 24th street with live performances by Giorno and Murillo to take place during the run of the exhibition.

Giorno, who began making text paintings of his poetry in 1967 is a veteran of the downtown New York art scene. He is best known for his short aphoristic slogans of found phrases, sometimes taken from advertising, often altered, which become the material form for his visual art works. For Movement in Three Parts, Giorno will present a series of new drawings and paintings, titled, I WANT IT TO RAIN FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. Ranging from 12 to 20 inches on a side, they have the immediacy of tabloid headlines and the grittiness of street art. Coming of age during the era of pop art in which Giorno became a central force, he employed the tactics of appropriation using found texts as poetry, then inserting multimedia elements and performance into his spoken texts, and applying these found phrases into his text paintings.

Using the gallery as his studio, London-based Oscar Murillo’s roughly marked, graffitiesque paint- ings show evidence of the dirt, dust, and fluids accumulated in the gallery. Used as materials to stain his canvases, Murillo ends up permanently imprinting them through a variety of performative actions, sometimes compounded by gestures of painting to add color and/or a single word that conjures up an action from daily life. For the exhibition, Murillo has made an entire new body of work using his recycling process as a point of departure: reusing canvases which have been stitched together to create large-scale banners and a window installation of posters featuring previous works printed on newspaper stock.

Ruais uses malleable and fluid materials, such as plaster and clay, for their ability to hold the shape of a gesture and for their historical use in representing the body. Her sculpture hovers between abstraction and figuration, often alluding to the absence of the body through the presence of the hand. Ruais’ sculptures are the result of specific exercises: spreading out her body-weight in clay, pushing hundreds of pounds of clay up a wall, or throwing clay into a corner after Serra’s lead splashes. Her work directly implicates the body in its form by employing it as a physical tool to shape her material creating sculptures, wall works and videos, which also function as records of her process. Ruais investigates gender, sexuality, and the body through the various stages of fluidity exhibited by her material: hardened plaster, wet, raw, and fired clay. For Movement in Three Parts, Ruais contributes new works including a muscular Process-Art work made on site along with a new wall piece of ceramic tiles and plaster sculptures.