Traces of the Body
The exhibition Traces of the Body presents the first solo exhibition in Germany of US-American artist Kylie Manning. Her paintings shift between figuration and abstraction. Bodies emerge as traces, dissolving into layered fields of color and light.
At Villa Schöningen, these works enter into dialogue with historical positions such as Jan Brueghel II, Marina Abramović or Anselm Kiefer. Together, they open new perspectives on visibility, memory, and the representation of the human body.
Zum Paradies. Akt II
Drawing on Prince Wilhelm von Nassau’s notion of paradise, Paradise Island understands paradise not as a physical place, but as a projection surface for human longing—for retreat, control, and beauty in an overstimulated present. The garden becomes a conceptual space in which utopia and escapism, nature and construction intersect and overlap. Never historically innocent, it emerges both as a site of protection and a political terrain—an arena of care and exclusion, and of new ecological entanglements in the age of the Anthropocene.
Today’s paradise appears increasingly synthetic, shaped by digitality, self-optimization, and chemical substitute worlds. The exhibition reads this condition as a symptom of our time and transforms the garden of Villa Schöningen into a landscape suspended between ecstasy and exhaustion, beauty and decay.
