Lefebvre & fils Gallery presents the first European solo show by American artist Brie Ruais, Dugout, from October 22nd until December 20th 2014 in collaboration with Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, and conceived by Gilles Renaud.

New York artist, Brie Ruais explores the material capacities of clay in a process that merges performance with sculpture, the figurative with the abstract and the sensual with the spiritual.

Brie Ruais’s work is a corporeal experience characterized by three constant rules: an amount of clay equal to her weight, total absence of tools and a preliminary written set of instructions for each piece. Her works of art retain the memory of being occupied - they exist as both gestures and images of gestures, simultaneously fluid and frozen.

For her first solo show in Europe, Brie Ruais has developed a body of work that employs archaic movements. The pieces in the exhibition have been made by digging and tearing out the center of a mass of clay. She has titled the show Dugout to refer to the method of making the work, as well as to a term that describes interventions with the landscape. A "dugout" is both a canoe made from a hollowed tree trunk, and a small trench below ground level. By way of these associations, Brie Ruais performs an excavation of memory, time, and our physical relationship to the land.

Born in 1982 in California, Brie Ruais received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of Arts in 2011. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where Nicole Klagsbrun represents her.

Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Brussels and New Zealand. Her work has been discussed in The New York Times, ArtNews, Artforum, The New Yorker, Modern Painters, Bomb Magazine and Architectural Digest, among others.