At Pace, Kylie Manning Wields Paint as an Alchemical Tool
Kylie Manning’s paintings are forged by a kind of alchemical tension between celestial and terrestrial forces that causes her pigments to gravitate and fluctuate across the canvas until they land, settle and rest as existential traces upon it. That push/pull made manifest is now on view in the expansive two-location exhibition that marks her New York debut with Pace Gallery following last year’s representation announcement. The show, titled “There is something that stays,” stands both as a continuation of her exhibition at Space K in Seoul and as a testament to a new chapter in life—one marked by the existential and artistic clarity awakened by pregnancy and birth.
“I recently had a baby, and it’s really like how someone described it: like astronauts going to outer space and seeing earth for the first time from another perspective,” Manning told Observer ahead of the opening. “It’s called the overview aspect. They get overwhelmed by its beauty. It’s something very emotional that reveals also our inner fragility against the immensity of the universe.”
She described how the experience of giving birth—of encountering such overwhelming beauty—left her deeply grateful for her own existence. She felt compelled to honor the essence of people and all the life surrounding her, especially given how fleeting time can be. For this series on view at Pace, Manning worked in the studio with models, friends and fellow creatives in the city, seeking to capture the vitality—the élan vital—that animates creativity and life itself.
Still, human subjects are merely a pretext—a point of departure—for Manning, whose paintings remain deliberately suspended between figuration and abstraction. She is more compelled by the invisible systems of interdependent and interconnected forces between bodies, space and nature. “I don’t think of abstraction and figuration as opposites,” she clarified. “It all depends on the quantity of information. However, figures are such an interesting form, and allow viewers to project themselves into the work.”
Manning describes her process as a tide—paint poured onto the canvas in sweeping whirlwinds, then held in place by rhythmic mark-making that reins in the potential chaos of those movements. The balance between thinner and oil pigment, or the use of pure powdered pigment, determines how far the tide will pull away. From this dynamic exchange, parts of the figure remain while other parts dissolve or are carried off with the current. “It’s sort of this notion of abstraction as a way covering souls so that those souls can fill and build up the body of work.”
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Her mark-making, at once energetic and intuitively fluid, channels and activates these movements—flows of matter and energy that, like
Energetically and spiritually dense, Manning’s latest paintings suggest an essential truth about reality’s transitional and interrelational structure, where all things exist in a constant flux of forces and energies. This reality is fleeting—always subject to change, transformation and eventual return—within a perpetual cycle of germination, growth and decay.
The depth that emerges from these canvases, combined with the bewildering and tempestuous rhythm of their animated gestures, recalls the Romantic notion of the sublime—a sensation that merges awe and fear in the face of nature’s vastness and uncontainable power. That confrontation with grandeur, that brush with something elemental and beyond, invites not only admiration but also terror and spiritual reckoning. It’s a recognition of human fragility in the presence of something enduring, majestic and indifferent.
It’s no surprise, then, that Manning describes her practice in terms of ritual—a channeling process through which something universal, intangible and ineffable is unearthed. “Painting is such a mystery,” she said. “It’s about the alchemy, the vision and the magic. Putting together different materials and colors without knowing how they will react. Without knowing whether they will improve or ignite one another.”
In this new body of work, Manning pushes her alchemical exploration further, embedding fragments of minerals and natural elements—tourmaline, calcite, quartz—into the very texture of her paintings. Through a delicate interplay of fission and fusion, these surfaces come alive, responding to light and vibrating with a raw intensity.
Balancing formal rigor with intuitive spontaneity, the exhibition meditates on the desire to anchor life’s transient beauty in paint, even as it slips inevitably into change. In doing so, Manning weaves into the work a deep tension between permanence and impermanence, pushing further her exploration of being, existing and experiencing time. Yet rather than drawing any nihilistic conclusion, for Manning this awareness becomes an opportunity—a way to reconsider our position in nature. “Our insignificance is our interconnection. Our ability to understand how unimportant we are is our ability to be more part of a landscape around us.”
Ultimately, in both their process and structure, Manning’s paintings confront and embrace the fleeting, rapid nature of experience and the inevitability of continual natural flux. And yet, these works simultaneously seem to hold space for a deeper longing: a desire to anchor, to immortalize, to preserve the miracle of life in two dimensions. To memorialize the beauty of being alive—what lingers, however briefly, from a universe in constant motion—knowing that eternity, in the end, is only ever an illusion.
“Kylie Manning: There is something that stays” is on view at Pace, New York (510 & 540 West 25th Street) through April 19, 2025.