Inspired by notions of masculinity as portrayed in Spaghetti Westerns, New York-based contemporary artist Kylie Manning paints lyrical, atmospheric works that oscillate between the abstract and figurative.
Read MoreBorn in Juneau, Alaska, Manning grew up spending significant periods living in Mexico with her parents who were both art teachers. She has often cited the geographies of the places she has lived as a major influence in her practice, informing the atmosphere, scale, and colours of her paintings.
Manning holds a BA in Visual Art and Philosophy from Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts (2006), and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art (2010). In 2010, Manning moved to Leipzig in Germany. She lived there for two years, working alongside artists such as Neo Rauch, who was a proponent of the New Leipzig School. Manning's time in Germany proved to be a significant influence in the development of her practice.
Working between figuration and gestural abstraction, Manning presents indistinct groups of figures in her paintings, in ethereal layers of pinks, olives, ochres, and deep greens. The artist often references old family photographs to form her compositions, embedding personal narratives into her works.
Manning was influenced by the novels of Karl May, a 19th-century German author whose stories of the American 'Wild West' are often perceived as precursors to the Spaghetti Western subgenre. Through her paintings, Manning began to explore stereotypes around the Western, masculinity, and the notion of 'true grit'.
In the series, 'By the Horns' (2011), Manning explores the American cowboy archetype and its associations of masculinity. Set in hazy, ambiguous landscapes, Manning subverts the conventionally masculine image of the herding cowboy with a feminine edge, with the figure abstracted and bathed in swirling colour contrasts. Her palette invokes the orange skies and sprawling rocky deserts of the mid-west, and establishes a specific atmosphere. Manning has stated: 'My goal is to utilise temperature and light in a way that invites viewers to remember a time when the light was just so... If I can capture a specific light, it transports people into the space. Then they can meet the abstracted figures in a less objective way'.
For her solo exhibition, Zweisamkeit – Being In Two Is No More Than Double Solitude (2021) at New York's Anonymous Gallery, Manning presented four large-scale paintings produced during the pandemic. The exhibition's title refers to zweisamkeit, a German concept that considers 'togetherness' as an exclusive state of being, to the point where the rest of the world ceases existing. In this new series of works, Manning reinterprets zweisamkeit to consider this duality resulting in double the solitude, or double the loneliness.
In Piggy (2021), the viewer recognises a group of figures engaged in the familiar activity of piggy-backing. Their bodies, composed of rough strokes of oils, melt seamlessly into the background. In the oil on linen work Zweisamkeit (2021), a series of figures appear almost intertwined as one, with fragments of body parts barely isolated from one another, dissolving into their setting.
Kylie Manning has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Select solo exhibitions include Zweisamkeit – Being In Two Is No More Than Doubled Solitude, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2021); Waldeinsamkeit, KN Gallery, Berlin (2017); Aftermath, Centro Cultural de Chiapas Jaime Sabines, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico (2015).
Select group exhibitions include Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, Pace Gallery, New York (2021); COVID19 DIARIES, LOVASS Projects, Munich (2020); NGORONGORO II, Lehderstrasse 34, Berlin (2018); In Bester Form, Kunsthalle der Sparkasse Leipzig, Leipzig (2012).
Kylie Manning's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
