NEW YORK, NY.- Pace is presenting There is something that stays, Kylie Manning’s first major solo exhibition in New York, across its 510 and 540 West 25th Street galleries. On view from March 14 to April 19, this presentation brings together ten new, never before-seen paintings of various sizes, including intimately scaled works and monumental triptychs.
This monograph highlights the lyrical, atmospheric paintings of Brooklyn-based painter Kylie Manning (born 1983).
For her debut with Pace in New York, where she has lived and worked for the last 20 years, Manning will present paintings forged in local minerals—tourmaline, calcite, and quartz—that pulse with the energy of the city and its people. In these works, she explores both personal and universal experiences of time, meditating on its rapidness and its inevitability. For the artist, this contemplation of time relates to her life as a new mother—particularly the ways that the brain is chemically changed during and after pregnancy.
Alchemical enactments of coming together and falling apart—moments of panic and precarity—are intensified in her new paintings, which seem poised on the edge of disintegration. This constant pushing and pulling of forms, a visual expression of a war of attrition against time, is especially evident in Manning’s figurations, which are simultaneously born from and washed away by abstraction. Her urgent, frenetic mark-making in these works reflects a slipping away of time—reinventing what draftsmanship can be, Manning fills her latest compositions with observations that break their own logic.
The exhibition’s title, There is something that stays, references a passage from a Jorge Luis Borges poem, capturing the tension between time’s inexorable march and the imprinted moments of stillness or rupture within it. The pieces in the show will leave viewers with transient memories—images that shift between fragments of ephemeral experiences—while also offering rare glimpses of serene moments that anchor us in the present.
“These works have a force, or an urgency, because time feels utterly predatory,” Manning says. “It’s not about the vanity of time, but the tragedy that those we cherish are fleeting.”
Working in her studio with models—friends who are writers, dancers, filmmakers, and other creatives based in New York—Manning imbues her new figurations with local resonance and relevance. Tracing her models’ movements in space on canvas, she transposes her community into a place beyond the confines and dictates of time. In these works, the artist also continues her investigations of how choreography and flux can be captured in a two- dimensional medium. In the last two years, Manning brought these formal explorations, which have long been central to her practice, to her monumental collaboration with Christopher Wheeldon for the New York City Ballet, creating large-scale backdrops and costumes for his production From You Within Me, which has been presented in 2023 and 2025. Immersed in rehearsals for the ballet, her recent works have examined the ways that individual marks can hint at tempo, oscillation, and perspective, cultivating a balance between implication and motion.
Manning—whose work can be found in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the X Museum in Beijing, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai—is known for her lyrical, atmospheric paintings. Deeply informed by her experiences living in Alaska and Mexico during her childhood, the artist’s works situate genderless, anonymous, spectral figures within sweeping landscapes that often capture the light and environments specific to those locations. The tangled bodies in her theatrical, stage-like compositions move through dreamlike spaces, recalling the grand 19th-century history paintings of Winslow Homer and Gustave Courbet. Using ground pigments and techniques employed by Old Masters like Johannes Vermeer, Manning applies layers of oils to her canvases, producing a radiant, energetic effect that seems to refract light across the surfaces of her works.
Kylie Manning (b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska) is a mid-career painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is heavily informed by the atmospheres, latitudes, and colors present in the various geographies of her childhood. Using brushwork, light, and balance, the artist captures moments within her personal history, such as her time working on Alaskan fishing boats and memories of surfing in Mexico. Through her practice, Manning re-contextualizes the concept of traditionally gendered “masterpieces" with an eye toward contemporary feminism, and her visual lexicon is as much in conversation with J.M.W. Turner and Frans Hals as it is Ruth Asawa and Berthe Morisot. Manning's oil paint compositions center on ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures within expansive, disparate landscapes. She purposefully leaves the origin, gender, and raison d'être of the forms within her paintings up to interpretation, allowing the viewer to step into her world, yet form their own reading of the work. The resulting works vibrate with energy and light, flickering before the viewer's eyes.
Manning explores the balance between figuration and abstraction through expert draftsmanship, painting, mark- making, and a refined technical process. Within her painting practice, the artist begins each body of work as a family, stretching the surfaces and employing rabbit skin glue, which primes the canvas and provides a buoyant backdrop. She spends a great deal of time spreading oil ground (a material used to prime oil paintings) with a palette knife, before sanding down each layer, building a relationship to each individual piece before she brings in color. She is acutely aware of the scale, energy, and groove of the linen before ‘beginning.’ When Manning eventually incorporates color, it begins through a hierarchy of refracted light. She grinds pure pigments with safflower oil and starts with a Sumi-e-like wash using broad chip brushes and paint rollers to create thin but wide strokes. While still wet, she takes a rag and begins to pull the composition out by wiping and ripping away saturated areas. Eventually sketching in paint with loaded brushes, she reiterates or shifts the composition. Each layer is separated with a slightly thicker layer of safflower and walnut oil to refract light, a technique common with Dutch Baroque painters, such as Johannes Vermeer. Orchestrating ethereal sketches of landscapes and figures, she balances delicate whirlwinds of color with a contemporary feminist sense of humor. Manning’s works feel simultaneously thin and radiant, light glowing from within the paintings themselves.
Recent one-artist exhibitions of her work include Kylie Manning: Waldeinsamkeit, KN Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2017); Kylie Manning: Zweisamkeit - Being in Two Is No More Than Doubled Solitude, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2021); Kylie Manning: Both Sides Now, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Kylie Manning: You Into Me, Me Into You, Pace Gallery, Geneva (2023); Kylie Manning: Sea Change, X Museum, Beijing (2023–2024), which traveled to Pace Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); and Kylie Manning: Yellow Sea, Space K, Seoul (2024). Kylie Manning: Sea Change was accompanied by Manning's first catalogue from Pace Publishing and features an essay by art historian and writer Ted Barrow as well as images and full-bleed details of Manning’s recent works and projects. Her work is held in numerous collections worldwide including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; X Museum, Beijing, China; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
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