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.