After several years as an active graffiti artist, Martin Mannig decided on a course of study at the Dresden Academy of Plastic Arts (GfBK). He has taken graffiti aesthetics further and now simulates the advantages and disadvantages of street spraying, for example the spraying over of his own picture by other graffiti artists etc., thus developing a 'struggle for the image' within his own studio. His works have a futuristic character derived from the world of the cartoon film, a feature underlined in its other-worldliness by the compositional isolation both of his paintings and of his drawings. With gentle irony he combines elements of a variety of toy figures, combines them with characteristics of diverse figures from cartoons or comics or employs the models and templates of graffiti language in a new context. But also a garden gnome is to be found forlorn in a suggested mountain landscape, its gaze directed into the far distance, questing.
The characters of the drawings can be re-discovered in compressed form in the large-scale oilpaintings. Characters that exist in isolation in the drawings now fight for their place in the group on the big canvas in the 'Ansammlung' ('Collection') series. Mannig creates swift parallel worlds.
He has retained the rapidity with which he had to work as a graffiti artist. Thus a figure can be overlapped or covered by another, or compelled into an existence secured only by vague contours. The process of image-creation or the hierarchy of the subjects involved is visible, as on
the wall of a building. The impression is of brevity, the brief flaring up of a puzzling personage, the parallelism of events – impressions and thoughts which Mannig, referring to his origins in the world of graffiti, now transfers to a firmly established medium heavy with symbolism.
( Statement, 2014 http://galerie-lehmann.com/_site/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Martin-Mannig-Art-Statements-Text-engl-s.pdf)