Margherita Manzelli: Bluebird

Milan-based artist Margherita Manzelli has her first solo exhibition in New York after eight years at gallery Lehmann Maupin, featuring recent paintings and drawings. The Italian artist’s signature style is characterised by portraits of young women, fictional characters who express deep psychological tension and complex emotional status somehow reflecting the artist’s personality. Manzelli’s figures both keep their own individuality and recall archetypal roles, staging all the power of female gaze and developing the enigmatic narrative of female identity, questioning what it means to be a solitary woman—whether isolation denotes autonomy, vulnerability, independence or abandon. Manzelli portrays these figures in traditional oil painting techniques while emerging from abstract backgrounds, characterised by hypnotic wide-set eyes.