Run church, Run Restaurant, Run Store is Susan Cianciolo’s first solo exhibition with Modern Art, and the first solo showing of her work in the UK.

Susan Cianciolo’s works are composite things. Their material elements include fragments of sculptures, drawings, costumes, and meaningful units of ephemera from her life and work – the difference between which, for Cianciolo, is and has always been willfully eschewed. Her exhibition at Modern Art includes a selection of filled boxes that Cianciolo terms ‘kits’, a prototypical format of her work, which are assemblages of items from her archives that are reworked, and reformulated for public presentation as a tool-boxes cum biographical archives. Cianciolo’s exhibition will also include new body of sculptural works, tapestries, and drawings that characterize the many physical forms her work has taken across the arc of her oeuvre.

Since the beginning of her career as a fashion designer in the mid 1990s, Susan Cianciolo has worked across the boundaries established by her chosen disciplines. Between 1995 and 2001, working under her label Run, she created eleven ranges of hand-made, unique garments and displayed them in runway shows that incorporated collaborations between music, film, fashion, performance and hospitality. The term ‘collection’ for Cianciolo’s Run was as much about a collection of people, or of talents, as it was about the release of a collection every season. This expansive, collective approach has persisted in her work, which is now shown in museums and galleries, as much as through live performances, printed publications, and workshops.

Susan Cianciolo was born in 1969 in Providence, RI, and she lives and works in New York City. From 1995–2001 Cianciolo produced her critically-acclaimed collection RUN. More recently, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Yale Union, Portland, OR, USA (2016); 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2016); Bridget Donahue, New York, NY, USA (2015); and Alleged Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2011). Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York, NY, USA (2016); Greater New York at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, USA (2015); as well as at The Swiss Institute, New York, NY, USA (2016); Interstate Projects, New York, NY, USA (2016); White Columns, New York, NY, USA (2016); and Portikus Museum, Frankfurt, Germany.

Susan Cianciolo’s exhibition, Run church, Run Restaurant, Run Store, at Modern Art coincides with her exhibition Run Prayer, Run Cafè, Run Library, which runs from 21 September to 3 December at Bridget Donahue, New York.