We live in a time characterized by acceleration and fleeting moments. Encounters, images, and experiences appear and disappear rapidly. Sociologists describe this phenomenon as “social acceleration,” which is characterized by the constant intensification of the rhythms of work, communication, and perception. Transience is no longer the exception but a fundamental aspect of life.

In this context, the following questions arise: What remains when the permanent erodes, and how can the transitory be made visible? In a time when the media stages bodies, politics negotiates them, and the economy exploits them, what traces do they leave behind?

The paintings of US artist Kylie Manning (born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1983; currently living in Brooklyn) offer a poetic response. Her paintings, which are being shown comprehensively in Germany for the first time, move between figuration and abstraction. Bodies appear not as solid forms, but as suggestions. Light and movement are inscribed into multilayered surfaces that reveal an inner glow through glazing, sanding, and pigment application processes. Manning’s works seem like landscapes of memory: familiar yet distant, a fleeting presence in the moment of their disappearance.

Kylie Manning created most of her large-format works specifically for this exhibition. Her pieces deliberately correspond to select art-historical positions. They engage in dialogue with Jan Brueghel II, whose Baroque imagery attempted to organize the world; Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who depicted fragile bodies; and Marina Abramović and Ulay, as well as Anselm Kiefer, who treated the body as a process, trace, and memory. These correspondences open up a space of resonance in which questions of physicality, visibility, power, and gender intersect. The body is no longer perceived as a static form but as movement, trace, and transition.

Traces of the Body asks: How can we understand the fleeting – as loss or as possibility? Could the ephemeral offer a clearer view of the body, the moment, and ourselves?

Pola van den Hövel