anonymous is pleased to announce Zweisamkeit - Being In Two Is No More Than Double Solitude, Kylie Manning’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Consisting of 4 large-scale oil paintings from a series created throughout the pandemic; each work shares an upside-down romanticism where mystic bodies intertwine and disconnect - living in worlds alone, yet together. It is often fragments of one figure or face that project more so than the reduced complexions of surrounding cohorts. In paintings like Stungenhour - where everything can start again, curves of a hip or lip dissolve and dive into siennas and then dash and leap into gestures of cobalts and elusive encounters. Constructed through complex layers of oil paint and washes, paintings like Manning’s Piggy, 2021 intensify the human presence by drawing you near a familiar gathering only to disillusion through unidentified yet distinguished somatic signals.

As the art historian Armin Kunz has written about Manning’s work: Her observations return in disintegrating, dystopian landscapes that are both anarchic and humorous. Large, undulating masses billow forth and reveal themselves to the viewer only gradually and force us to contemplate our relationship with intimacy as well as nature. At the same time, her virtuoso brushwork displays an irreverent spontaneity that manages to evoke a specific time and place, thereby grounding us as viewers in our own here and now.

It is this intense intimacy in Manning’s work that embraces and comforts you, but that can also leave you abandoned. Feelings of seclusion have been unrelenting for many in the last year - whether solo, with a partner, or in groups. In English, the meaning of the word lonely considers one person that is isolated from others and therefore incomplete without a unit of two or more - where one's emotional state is dependent upon physical status. The German word Zweisamkeit infers another state of being, where two people are so complete in their togetherness that the rest of the world ceases to exist. However as Zweisamkeit replaces one with two, Manning then questions lonely as the derivative of two equaling a whole, where that same completion equals double the solitude.

In another part of her life, Manning worked in commercial fishing, which taught her how to literally read the water for sub-surface cues, from creatures to danger to bioluminescence. Manning’s images are not so different from plunging a hand into water at the right moment, wanting to catch something. In the split second before knowing whether that something was really there, desire makes it almost palpable in the palm. In the mind’s eye, paint slides into form and stays put. But in real time, the hand closes wetly around itself; the painting moves slyly out of focus; and the viewer is left with the retinal burn of what might have been, which remains on the canvas like a stamp. The image is already on the move, ready to bait you again elsewhere, in a smile, the dip of a waist, the movement of a branch against a cloud. Will you be ready this time?

• (excerpt from text by Gaby Collins-Fernandez)

Kylie Manning is a painter and curator born in Juneau, Alaska. The Brooklyn based artist is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College Summa Cum Laude with a double Major in Philosophy and Visual Arts. While earning a Masters from the New York Academy of Art, Manning was sent to Leipzig, Germany by Eileen Guggenheim to exhibit and study alongside the New Leipzig School. Her training in Germany exposed her to the New Leipzig School’s version of Surrealism whose narratives she toys with in her own paintings. Using pure pigments dispersed with safflower and walnut oil, Manning creates a whirlwind of thinly layered oil sketches using a variety of traditional techniques. Manning imbues her compositions with a contemporary feminist sense of humor re-contextualizing the macabre aftermath of traditionally gendered “masterpieces.”

Recent exhibitions and acquisitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Hollis Taggart, New York, NY; CG Boerner Gallery, New York, NY; Sotheby’s New York, NY; Every Woman Biennial, New York, NY; PI London, UK; Ngorongoro II, Berlin, Germany; SPRING/BREAK art show, New York, NY; The Sabines Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico; KN Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA; Zeedijk, Ostend, Belgium; Art-Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe Germany; St-Art Fair, Paris, France; and the Spinnerei, Leipzig Germany.

For further information contact: hello@anonymousgallery.com

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Kylie Manning .