Kylie Manning

There is something that stays

On View
Mar 14 – Apr 19, 2025
New York

Pace is pleased to present 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 will bring together ten new, never-before-seen paintings of various sizes, including intimately scaled works and monumental triptychs.

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, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, and Xin Wang

Pace Live

Kylie Manning In Conversation with Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

Moderated by Xin Wang

Wednesday, Apr 16
6:30 – 8 PM EDT
510 West 25th Street
New York

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It’s really important that the figures always remain a bit open and androgynous and just not nailed in, so that everybody can participate a little bit more fully.

Kylie Manning

Films

Kylie Manning on Painting Against Time

This film takes you inside Kylie Manning's New York studio on the occasion of her first major solo exhibition in the city. Here, Manning is joined by three of her friends who model for her figurations—Tristan McAllister, Philip Embury, and Juan Manuel Brest—to discuss how painting can honor and immortalize people and places. The artist also sheds light on how she is exploring new conversations between wash and line in her process, initiating what she calls "a race against time to find the composition" as she brings her paintings to life.

40°54'07.4"N , 72°18'08.5"W by Kylie Manning

The concept of change threads throughout Manning’s paintings, which are kinetic and feel as though constantly in flux even in their final form.

Kristen Tauer, (opens in a new window) WWD

About the Artist

Kylie Manning 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.

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EXHIBITION DETAILS

Kylie Manning
There is something that stays
Mar 14 – Apr 19, 2025

GALLERY

510 & 540 West 25th Street
New York

PRESS

Press Release

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Journal

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Kylie Manning

There is something that stays

Pace Live

Kylie Manning In Conversation with Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

Moderated by Xin Wang

Films

Kylie Manning on Painting Against Time

Checklist

About the Artist

EXHIBITION DETAILS

GALLERY

PRESS

CONNECT

Journal

Kylie Manning on Painting Against Time

Kylie Manning

Dancing Between Abstraction and Figuration

Pace Artists Reflect on Mark Rothko