RUG
RUG is an intimately scaled performance developed by Gerard & Kelly as part of their residency at Orsolina28 Art Foundation.
The work unfolds within a spare and poetic installation: eleven music stands dispersed throughout the space, each presenting a spread of the RUG score. A carpet designed by Eileen Gray anchors the space. Conceived as a duet for a dancer and a musician, RUG explores design as a framework for freedom and as a model for relationships.
RUG originated as an artists’ book by Gerard & Kelly, published by Three Star Books in 2025. A performance score spread across eleven tactile spreads, the book reflects on Gray’s legacy while proposing a manifesto for interdisciplinary art-making. In RUG, the past is not static; it moves. Gerard & Kelly transform Gray’s carpet designs into musical and choreographic notations, activated by bodies in motion. A poem written by the artists and hand-stenciled throughout the book threads through the performance, shaping its textual and rhythmic pulse.
At Orsolina28, Gerard & Kelly partner with dancer and long-term collaborator Awa Joannais, composer and musician Joseph Schiano di Lombo and sound designer Sammy Bichon. A co-production with Librairie 7L and Orsolina28, RUG will premiere at the Villa Medici in Rome as part of the Festival des Cabanes in June 2026
Gerard & Kelly
Gerard & Kelly are artists whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, performance and installation. Working across choreography, filmmaking, writing, drawing, and sculpture, they are known for their conceptual rigor and emotionally layered approach, bringing questions of memory, history, and subjectivity into dialogue with architecture and site.
Based in Paris since 2018, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly began their collaboration in New York in the early 2000s, later studying at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and earning MFAs from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. Their first European institutional solo exhibition, Ruins, was presented at Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (2022–23). Their work has since been presented by Marian Goodman Gallery, Fondation Maeght, Centre Pompidou, and others, and is held in major international museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art.