But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more
transient than we ourselves, who from their earliest days
are savagely wrung out
by a never-satisfied will (for whose sake)? Yet it wrings them,
bends them, twists them, swings them and flings them
and catches them again; and falling as if through oiled
slippery air, they land
on the threadbare carpet, worn constantly thinner
by their perpetual leaping, this carpet that is lost
in infinite space

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fifth Elegy, Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Hong Kong location “Subrisio Saltat”, Grace Carney’s first solo exhibition in Asia. The exhibition features a selection of new paintings and drawings from 2025.

Carney was born in 1992 in Minnesota and is based in New York. Through painting and drawing, Carney tackles personal experiences, memories, and relationships by acknowledging vulnerability and precariousness, starting each artwork from a position of discomfort or self-imposed limitation. Major pieces in the current exhibition including Subrisio Saltat (2025), D for Duration (2025) and The Rose of Onlooking (2025) took their titles from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s seminal work Duino Elegies. Instead of narrating stories, however, Carney is concerned with orchestrating harmony and moments of dissonance, balancing forces, light, gravity, and heaviness of the paint in her work, while leaving the right to read, interpret and make intertextual associations to the viewer.

You, Girl (2025) takes as its point of departure Italian Mannerist painter Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, transforming a figure borne aloft by angels into a highly abstract contour, before rendering its body and movements substantially physical. The composition of pale, irregularly shaped lights flooding through from different impossible sources, effectively penetrating the central figure, is counterbalanced by the remarkably dense textures over the translucent body, turning this intangible corpus into an amalgamation of traces and marks.

(About Grace Carney)

Carney received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2014, and MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School, New York, NY, in 2022. She was awarded the Jane C. Carrol Scholarship in 2020-2022 and the Hohenberg Travel Grant in 2022. Her work was included in “I’m Not Your Mother” at P·P·O·W, New York, NY in 2022. Carney has been featured in various publications, including Galerie Magazine and W magazine. “Wrestle”, Carney’s first solo exhibition in Europe, was on view at Beacon Gallery, Munich, Germany, in 2022. Carney presented her first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, “girlgirlgirl”, in 2024. Carney’s art has been collected by international institutions and public collections, including: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Pond Society, Shanghai; Scharpff-Striebich Collection, Berlin; Shah Garg Foundation, New York; Marquez Art Projects, Miami; and Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon.