Manina's Yin Yang (1959) is among the largest known paintings by the artist to survive, and one of the largest ever to reach the market. Painted seven years after she settled permanently in Venice in 1952, it predates the 1960 death of her daughter Nina that would later deepen her work's spiritual weight, instead capturing her building the hybrid bird-human vocabulary — drawn from Venetian art and architecture — that defines her mature output. A life of displacement left Manina working mostly on small, fragile paper, making a canvas this size a rarity within her surviving body of work.

The composition turns on two intertwined bird-human forms — one rendered in black, the other in pale, feathered white — locked into a yin-yang embrace against a field of deep crimson red. A dark, eye-like sun burns between them, and the surrounding ground is scattered with small arrow and floral marks, with loose, scratchy line drawings worked into the upper corners. On the verso, Manina embedded rope, semi-precious stones, and a mirrored triangle — additions that push the painting beyond image-making toward a ritual object.

The painting comes from the collection of Albert Wolsky, the two-time Academy Award-winning costume designer behind All That Jazz, Bugsy, and Grease. Born in Paris in 1930, Wolsky fled Nazi-occupied France as a child and, like Manina, built a career translating interior experience into unforgettable images.