Untitled, 2014

Based in Los-Angeles, Michael Manning is considered one of the most prolific digital artists of our time. Interested in the aesthetics and function of the early 2000s internet, he creates playful and bright compositions using his fingers, default image software – such as Photoshop or Microsoft’s Fresh Paint – and touch-screen tablets. Manning then digitally turns those JPEG into canvases, adding final brushstrokes of traditional acrylic paint to create a faux impasto effect. One of his large-scale paintings that started as a JPEG, Chinese Broccolini Torta, hit the Philips Paddles On! digital art auction in London and fetched five times its initial estimate. Always in between digital and analogic, Manning’s art can be found in traditional galleries, in the closest Microsoft retail store of the West Coast – with his series of Microsoft Store Paintings – and online, in Tumblr blogs and numerous corners of the web under his alias Mirrrroring (4 Rs).

This piece is a sublime example of his highly acclaimed digital paintings, radicalizing the use of the JPEG as an artform. Manning aims to stretch the capacities of painting software to its limit, creating his iconic and striking Abstract-Expressionist digital works in the process. As the artist has stated, his artistic practice concerns ‘ideas about the internet, and technology, and the necessity of the object in a time when photography and the distribution of JPEG images and all sorts of documentation are prevailing’.