Sea Change (Diptych) by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, Sea Change (Diptych), 2023, oil on linen, 74" × 96" (188 cm × 243.8 cm), each panel, 148" × 96" (375.9 cm × 243.8 cm), overall © Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning

Portrait of Kylie Manning

© Meghan Marin

Kylie Manning draws on the latitudes and atmospheres of place to create ethereal paintings that exist on the precipice between convergence and dissolution. Raised between Alaska and various regions of Mexico, Manning grew up surrounded by environments shaped by extreme weather, light, and tides—conditions that continue to inform the spatial and phenomenological logic of her paintings.

Moments from her personal history, such as simultaneously witnessing the Northern Lights and bioluminescence while working aboard a commercial fishing boat in Alaska and learning to read the open water while surfing in Mexico, cultivated an embodied attunement to the forces and rhythms of land and sea. Manning’s paintings act as sites of devotion to these geographies, temperatures, and memories, all refracted through the lens of time. Manning’s works feel simultaneously diaphanous and unyielding; they vibrate with energy and light, flickering before the viewer’s eyes.

Manning approaches painting as a process of excavation—one in which the image is gradually uncovered rather than explicitly described. Her compositions occupy a state of continual becoming, shifting fluidly between landscapes and souls, often centering on ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures situated within expansive, disparate environments. Some figures appear clearly, while others are alluded to through lyrical swathes of paint that suggest the contour of a face or the curve of a body. Here, souls register as atmosphere, landscapes become a repository for memory, and light functions as both subject and material—a force through which her images coalesce and dissipate. Her paintings unfold across time, revealing their histories through the sustained act of looking while resisting a fixed narrative. Manning's compositions provide only a few points of orientation, offering viewers rare but essential means of navigation.

While her paintings primarily originate from within themselves, Manning draws on a range of source material including family photographs, personal photography, and live models—often friends and members from her creative circle. In 2023, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon invited Manning to collaborate on a new production for the New York City Ballet titled From You Within Me. To create her renowned landscapes, which were transferred onto two monumental scrims spanning the full width of the stage, Manning began by sketching during rehearsals as the dancers and choreographers found the lines of form inspired by her paintings. Through the resulting “momentum studies,” Manning deepened her career-spanning engagement with the information of form and her investigation of pacing and movement.

Manning begins each body of work as a family, in which paintings may exist in dialogue with one another while remaining independent. She does not use sketches or predetermined compositions; instead, each image is discovered through process. Manning develops her surfaces by first applying rabbit-skin glue as a primer, followed by successive layers of oil ground, each of which is sanded down. When she eventually incorporates color, she does so by grinding pure pigment with safflower oil, which is washed, rolled, wiped, and pulled from the surface. Through layers of accumulation and erasure, she builds her works using translucent washes, fine frenetic sketches, and decisive gestures, allowing the surfaces to grow and recede like estuaries.

In her recent practice, Manning has explored new compositional challenges of perspective, depth, and scale. Her large-scale triptych At the edge of things (2025) explores three impossible perspectives fused across the canvases: a steep landscape gives way to a mountain of entangled bodies before zooming out on dense layers of atmosphere. In the diptych The shadows of one another (2026), views from both inside and outside a cave are juxtaposed next to each other, recalling the allegory of the cave, a philosophical thought experiment from Plato’s Republic.

Manning often sources pigments from the bedrock of the place that inspired the body of work, allowing her to trace the shifting landscape as it responds to the changing conditions of light, weather, and temperature of its origin. In her most recent works, she incorporates Hampshire and London clay, along with silt from the River Thames, bringing the paintings physically as well as conceptually back to the geography that inspired them. Each layer of paint is separated with a slightly thicker layer of safflower and walnut oil to refract light, a technique common among Dutch Baroque painters, such as Johannes Vermeer. Choreographing landscapes and figures, she balances delicate whirlwinds of color with refined draftsmanship and a contemporary feminist sense of humor.

Of Manning, the artist Gaby Collins-Fernandez says: “For Manning, paint is a medium of inconsistency. If a line can be used to describe the parameter of a body which would not exist otherwise, it can also break the continuity of a painted picture. A line can misbehave, it can unstick itself from its place in proper perspective; can contour the wrong parts of the story; remind us that images are not a given in art. If eyes can gaze back at a viewer, so can stains. If brushwork can evoke water, grasses, and mists, it can also do a dance led less by grace than excitement, unsettling a painting laterally, in ripples. If gesture is a language, so are expressions and emoticons.”

Through her practice, Manning re-contextualizes the concept of traditionally gendered “masterpieces” with an eye toward contemporary feminism. Her visual lexicon is as much in conversation with Frans Hals as it is with Ruth Asawa. The art historian Theodore Barrow notes that “Manning’s work engages with the sublime in both senses: drawing from an epic tradition of seascapes of [Claude-Joseph] Vernet, [J. M. W.] Turner, [Gustave] Courbet, and [Winslow] Homer, in which immersive, fluid brushstrokes stoke aural networks, so that one feels them viscerally as much as optically. But ‘sublime’ also means to vaporize, to sublimate, and the abstract quality of her work, held in tightrope suspension above the figurative, beckons a non-verbal connection, a sensate bond that speaks to the body, not the mind.”

Manning is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, with a BA in philosophy and visual arts. While earning an MA from the New York Academy of Art, Manning was sent to Leipzig, Germany, to exhibit and work alongside the New Leipzig School. In Germany, she was exposed to the school’s version of Surrealism, whose tenets she now experiments with in her practice. In 2026, Manning was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts from New York Academy of Art.

Concurrent with her solo exhibition The Mudlarkers at Pace Gallery, London (October 6–November 14, 2026), Manning will present new paintings in a solo exhibition titled In an Overcast Sky, curated by Akis Kokkinos at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music in Athens, Greece (October 6, 2026–February 28, 2027). Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Kylie Manning: There is something that stays, Pace Gallery, New York (2025); Kylie Manning: Yellow Sea, Space K, Seoul (2024); Kylie Manning: Sea Change, X Museum, Beijing (2023–24), which traveled to Pace Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); Kylie Manning: You Into Me, Me Into You, Pace Gallery, Geneva (2023); Kylie Manning: Both Sides Now, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); and Kylie Manning: Zweisamkeit - Being in Two Is No More Than Doubled Solitude, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2021). Her work is held in collections worldwide, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; X Museum, Beijing; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Manning lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Inside Out by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, Inside Out, 2024, oil on linen, 80" × 96" (203.2 cm × 243.8 cm) © Kylie Manning

Metronome by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, Metronome, oil on linen, 80" × 96" (203.2 cm × 243.8 cm) © Kylie Manning

The Nature of Nature by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, The Nature of Nature, 2024, oil on linen, 96" × 80" (243.8 cm × 203.2 cm), 96" × 80" (243.8 cm × 203.2 cm), 96" × 74" (243.8 cm × 188 cm), 96" × 238" (243.8 cm × 604.5 cm), overall installed © Kylie Manning

What stays with us, and what falls behind by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, What stays with us, and what falls behind, oil on linen, 80" × 118" (203.2 cm × 299.7 cm) © Kylie Manning

King Tide by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, King Tide, 2023, oil on linen, 60" × 84" (152.4 cm × 213.4 cm) © Kylie Manning

Homage to Sailing Away by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, Homage to Sailing Away, 2024, silk and water-based pigment and dye, 18' × 23' (548.6 cm × 701 cm) © Kylie Manning

The Moon Races Along With Them by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, The Moon Races Along With Them, 2023, oil on linen, 48" × 60" (121.9 cm × 152.4 cm) © Kylie Manning

Undertow by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, Undertow, 2023, oil on linen, 70" × 90" (177.8 cm × 228.6 cm) © Kylie Manning

Mischief by Kylie Manning

Kylie Manning, Mischief, 2024, oil on linen, 12" × 16" (30.5 cm × 40.6 cm) © Kylie Manning