Swords and feathers by Kylie Manning

Zona Maco

Kylie Manning

Upcoming
Feb 4 – Feb 8, 2026
Mexico City
 
ART FAIR DETAILS

Zona Maco
Centro Banamex
Booth C119
February 4 – 8, 2026

CONNECT

(opens in a new window) Zona Maco
(opens in a new window) @zonamaco
(opens in a new window) @manningkylie
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Kylie Manning, Swords and feathers, 2025 © Kylie Manning
Pace will present a solo booth of new paintings by New York-based artist Kylie Manning at Zona Maco in Mexico City from February 4 to 8. The gallery’s booth will feature works inspired by the artist’s formative years living between Alaska and Mexico, composed with volcanic ash, cinnabar, malachite and pigments sourced from iron-oxide-rich earths in Mexico’s landscapes. Shown in this context, the paintings return materially as well as conceptually, carrying the physical trace of this place within their strata.

During her youth, Manning’s parents, who worked as schoolteachers in Juneau, Alaska, would drive their family to Mexico, where they would live for extended periods, traveling the country in their van. Manning remembers spending nearly all her time outdoors—particularly along the coast—in regions such as Puerto Escondido and Nayarit. These early encounters with oceanic and terrestrial environments left an indelible impression on her psyche, fostering a sensitivity to natural forces and an expanded sense of place that continues to inform her work.

The tension between the ocean’s beauty and its potential for mercilessness—especially in relation to storms that challenge coastal communities at all latitudes—is a thread that runs throughout Manning’s oeuvre. Working with thin oil washes, she allows the liquidity of the paint to flow like tides across the surface before refining the compositions. As Manning notes, “I understand painting not as representation but as event: a site of accumulated gesture and erasure where presence, care, and vulnerability accrue over time.”

In the new works, warm earth tones evoke both the glow of sunlight and the sepia cast of memory, while cooler hues recall the Alaskan tundra and the long darkness surrounding solitary ocean vessels at the edge of night. Some paintings carry moments of density—a charged mark-making that Manning associates with life in New York City—while others unfold with a more languid openness, a sense of interval shaped by time spent traveling the Pacific coast and working aboard commercial fishing vessels.

Across this body of work, perspective functions as an experiential condition, shifting scale and legibility so figures register differently across distance and time. Untethered from a single geography, the works operate as sites of orientation, where atmosphere and movement are traced through partial marks and softly abandoned lines. Figures emerge as presences of attunement rather than declaration—guides that carry and are carried—allowing grief, love, and memory to surface. Pace’s presentation at Zona Maco will run concurrently with Kylie Manning: Traces of the Body at Villa Schöningen in Potsdam, Germany, which continues through April 5.

 

Featured Works

Kylie Manning, At the edge of things, 2025, oil, volcanic ash, Azurite, malachite, cinnabar, hematite, iron oxides, graphite, charcoal on linen, 96" × 80" × 1-1/2" (243.8 cm × 203.2 cm × 3.8 cm), 3 panels, each 96" × 240" × 1-1/2" (243.8 cm × 609.6 cm × 3.8 cm), overall installed

My mark-making is inseparable from duration. Each surface records decision, resistance, and revision—scraped, wiped, sanded, reworked—so that intimacy emerges through labor rather than image. Time is not illustrated; it is embedded.

Kylie Manning
Kylie Manning, Hanging on the trace of a sigh, 2025, oil, copper, Azurite, malachite, quartz charcoal, graphite, metal oxides on linen, 80" × 110" × 1-1/2" (203.2 cm × 279.4 cm × 3.8 cm)
Kylie Manning, Face to face, 2025, Oil, volcanic ash, azurite, malachite, cinnabar, hematite, iron oxides, graphite, charcoal on linen, 80" × 110" × 1-1/2" (203.2 cm × 279.4 cm × 3.8 cm)
Kylie Manning, Edge of night to the right, 2025, Oil, volcanic ash, azurite, malachite, iron oxides, graphite, mica, charcoal on linen, 20" × 16" × 1-1/2" (50.8 cm × 40.6 cm × 3.8 cm)

What I offer are not images of crisis, but paintings made inside it: bodies bound by collective endurance, held in paint, moving together without certainty, carried forward by care.

Kylie Manning
Kylie Manning, Where stubborn memory rummages, 2025, Oil, volcanic ash, azurite, malachite, cinnabar, iron oxides, graphite, charcoal on linen, 16" × 20" × 1-1/2" (40.6 cm × 50.8 cm × 3.8 cm)
Kylie Manning, Swords and feathers, 2025, Oil, volcanic ash, azurite, malachite, hematite, iron oxides, graphite, charcoal on linen, 64" × 80" × 1-1/2" (162.6 cm × 203.2 cm × 3.8 cm)
Kylie Manning, Scatter, 2025, Oil, volcanic ash, azurite, malachite, hematite, iron oxides, graphite, charcoal on linen, 72" × 86" × 1-1/2" (182.9 cm × 218.4 cm × 3.8 cm)
To inquire about works by Kylie Manning, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.
 

Journal

View All