Kylie Manning

In these paintings, Manning embraces an intensity of color and compositional movement to create works held at the apex of a tide, where one state has not yet yielded to the next.

Marking her first solo exhibition in London, The Mudlarkers represents a continuation of Manning’s ongoing practice of creating site-specific paintings attuned to the unique histories and atmospheres of their destinations. Here, she incorporates Hampshire and London clay, along with silt from the River Thames, into her pigments, drawing on the local tradition of mudlarking, which dates to the late eighteenth century. Scavenging the banks of the Thames at low tide, mudlarkers once searched for objects of value to sell; today, they seek the historical artifacts—Roman coins, pottery shards, tobacco pipes, and other centuries-old fragments—that the river’s mud has preserved.

That excavatory quality, which manifests visually in areas of scraped and sanded paint, finds echoes in Manning’s personal history. She grew up in Juneau, Alaska—a town with more miles of mines than roads—where she learned to read the coast by its tides, waiting for low water to reveal her father’s geoduck farm and spending crisp summers digging for clams. This kinesthetic memory of tidal navigation, coastal terrain, and open water—at once savage and sublime—continually informs her practice. Through shifting modes of paint application, from ethereal washes to dense, gestural impasto, her canvases push, pull, swirl, and drag, leaving the viewer to search for footing—or for the glimmer of something briefly washed ashore.

“Something liminal remains, occupying the interval between arrival and ebb; the suspended state itself becomes the composition,” Manning explains. “Perhaps it is something of Juneau’s mining history that drew me to this particular London ritual: that old faith that within pressure, darkness, and accumulated matter something luminous might choose to reveal itself. Often, the painting has yet to yield it. But once you have entered the mouth of the cave, the only way out is through. You keep digging until, for an instant, the darkness gives something back—hopefully, something of value.”

At the heart of Manning’s new paintings is this tension between recognition and disappearance, presence and memory. Moving between landscapes and souls, the compositions suggest human forms and off-axis horizon lines without fully materializing them. Manning begins the works with under paintings of directly observed figure studies, onto which she then layers atmospheric terrains of paint, leaving only traces of shoulders, limbs, and faces. Carrying a kind of grief, the paintings acknowledge this loss while recognizing it as a site of transformation. In doing so they speak to Marcel Duchamp’s term “infrathin,” which describes the brief window of time in which an absence manifests in a physical presence, the way an exhalation of tobacco smoke still carries the wet heat of the mouth that exhaled it, or the way a body leaves an impression on a seat cushion. “The canvases are made entirely of such moments,” Manning says, “raggedly chasing the atmosphere or temperature of absence.”

Located not exactly in the physical realm but as if behind a veil, Manning’s paintings embrace the duality underlying “infrathin” with a range of contrasting temperatures, saturations, and densities. There’s a flux between liquid and ash. In a way, the color is adversarial—it’s always sparring. Within washes, Manning sketches with burned charcoal particles in delicate lines that rip across the surface, adding layers of immediacy to the slow build of the colors beneath and destabilizing the overall sense of time.

Here, Manning says, “there is something severe, something conscious of mortality, but also something opaline and lambent. The paintings are trying, with equal measures of desperation and hope, to navigate these oppositional truths. They chase visions already receding images that, even when obscured or lost, continue to exert their pressure. In that sense, I am always trying to grasp an image in passage—while it is slipping away or buried in layers, it becomes something other. The image is never still long enough to possess; perhaps the painting is not an attempt to hold it at all, but a record of trying to remain beside it as it changes state.”

Concurrently with The Mudlarkers, Manning will present new paintings in a solo exhibition, curated by Akis Kokkinos, at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Musicin Athens, Greece, from October 6, 2026, through February 28, 2027.

Essays

Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers

by Marc Glimcher

Mudlarker (n.) — a person who scavenges in the wet mud of a river, particularly along the River Thames in London, in search of valuable or historic objects.

Kylie Manning’s light-filled studio and light-filled personality are a bit deceptive. As you enter the room, all that brightness sets you up for a journey into a world filled with beauty and joy.

She places chairs near the south-facing window, hauling out towering canvases filled with watery swaths of color. And then the darkness, cradled in fields of rust and deep green, begins to seep through, and your experience starts to change.

Manning’s practice stems from two seemingly contradictory sources.

The first is the figure. After years of painting from models, Manning has developed a distinctive kind of figuration in which images emerge through transparent layers of wash. For the past decade, her figures have existed at varying levels of “completion”: faces and hands may be articulated in exquisite detail while torsos and legs appear only to disappear again into the surrounding landscape. These melting body parts are the power source of Manning’s paintings, even when they are entirely gone. 

The second point of departure is the color field. The skeins and washes that make up these paintings have always seemed to recall the fierce atmosphere of the artist’s native Alaska: turbulent seas, dramatic valleys, weather overtaking land. 

Diagonally stacked fields of color become Manning’s primary building blocks. Grand sweeps of luminous, thin pigment arrange themselves like geologic layers or sedimentation, interrupted by occasional drawings—some determinedly pictorial, some almost like doodles—breaking the edges of the underpinning planes.

The result is a roiling, Turner-esque texture. The texture of a storm, of a crashing sea or convulsing landscape. Billowing blooms are positioned in counterpoint to gritty, cross-hatched fields, like sky against earth, or earth against air. These fields assemble in the eye as tenuous, slippery depictions of reality. You strain to see the landscape through a sandstorm, or to make out distant formations through furious waves and spray.

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