Kylie Manning`s work celebrates and embraces a violent sensuosity that is both the nature of painting and of desire. Her paintings are about being picked up, swept away and dissolved into a mass of pure erotic sensation.

- Eric Fischl

PUBLICATIONS

2010, New York Times
2010, SpinArt Magazine
2010, Zeitgeist International Voice Magazine
2010, Artnet Galleries (http://www.artnet.de)

Cowboys and Indians, ten gallon hats and saloon girls, trusty steeds and bootstraps. In her latest series, Manning uses large-scale oil paintings to lift up the rug and peer beneath at the dusty past of the glorified wild frontier. Manning's work neither blatantly chides nor wholly embraces these, at times ridiculous, stereotypes. Nestled between smart painting and gorgeous painting, she does not pretend to take a moral high ground, yet playfully reworks the image of the American Cowboy over and over, challenging the cliché with a kind of friendly aggressiveness. The works are riddled with contrasting qualities, are all at once masculine yet feminine, emotional yet withholding, solemn yet hilarious. These oppositions create a kind of vibrating tension just beneath the surface of the paint, a life force.

At first glance, there is a quality to the paintings that almost looks like something that's been hunted, a buck turned inside out, organs and sinews freshly exposed to the air. That's not to say there is a grotesque quality to the paint, rather a glistening rawness that looks at the same time alluring-- practically delicious-- yet taboo somehow. A native Alaskan, Manning grew up engulfed in vast, wild landscapes with a certain spirit, a shared essence, that binds frontiers intimately with human beings. It is the kind of sensuousness that illuminates an almost secret agreement between all forms of life. Manning grew up untamed; open, running through forests and tumbling down gritty mountainsides. One can almost see her younger self, with knotted hair and skinned knees, triumphantly galloping across a plain of weeds and gravel in her own childhood games of Cowboys and Indians, unaware of their sociopolitical implications and how they would later inspire her.

Manning relocated to complete her graduate studies at the New York Academy of Art, and recently was awarded a grant to paint in Leipzig, where she first discovered the work of East German writer Karl May, an icon for his tales of cowboys morally and economically threatened by the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the American West. An entire canon of European films made in the 1960's and 1970's were inspired by adapting May's stories of nomadic wandering gunslingers into screenplays. Many of these films portraying the honourable west were written, directed, and starred by people who had never set foot on US soil, yet these simplified notions of western life stuck, and today still act as a lens through which the rest of the world views America.

The subverted American masculinity in Manning's work is not always easy to behold-- while contextually rich, the artist refuses to reveal too much, seems to want to challenge us, play with us, and this is absolutely instrumental to the success of her canvases. A virtuoso with color and texture, she is able to transport us into a warmly sensuous yet brutally erotic memory of a world that once was. The series, aptly titled By the Horns, bucks and sways-- it is alive, inquisitive and strong, a portrait of the artist herself somehow.

- Katie Armstrong