About
Max Manning is a Houston-based painter whose practice he describes as “algorithmic abstraction”, studio-built systems that he deliberately disrupts to create compositions where loosely figurative fragments, patterns, and color fields collide. Working in series, Manning sets up rule-driven visual frameworks such as grids, repeated motifs, cut-outs, and layered shapes, and then interrupts them through shifts in palette, gesture, and scale. The result is a retro-contemporary language: paintings that acknowledge a world shaped by data and screens while insisting on the tactility, stillness, and breath of paint.
This one-of-a-kind abstract artwork on paper measures 20 inches high by 16 inches wide. This artwork is not framed. The artist signed it on the back, and it comes with a certificate of authenticity from the art gallery. Convenient delivery is available for those in the local Los Angeles area, and affordable worldwide shipping is available for US and international art collectors.
Across his practice, Manning has maintained a clear studio ethos: to “paint through the questions” of life lived alongside algorithms. Instead of reproducing digital aesthetics, he uses rule sets to destabilize them—allowing glitches, misalignments, and pauses to surface. The work’s visual “systems” act less like predictive code and more like open, humanized structures where attention can rest. This stance has resonated with curators and collectors attuned to abstraction’s current arc: grounded in art-historical form, responsive to contemporary cognition, and committed to the slow time of looking.
Manning earned a BFA in Two-Dimensional Studies from Bowling Green State University (2011) and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati (2014). His work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad and gained early institutional and critical attention through selection for the 2017 Texas Biennial, curated by Leslie Moody Castro, with press coverage in Texas arts media.
