Museum Exhibitions

Kylie Manning

In an Overcast Sky

Oct 6, 2026 – Feb 21, 2027
B & M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music
Athens, Greece

Featuring works created specifically for this exhibition, alongside loans from Pace Gallery and private collections, this exhibition of work by Kylie Manning unfolds across the B & M Theocharakis Foundation’s second floor as an immersive setting shaped by movement, memory and the geographies of her upbringing. Rooted in lived experience, her practice constructs atmospheric fields where bodies, weather and traces of motion occupy liminal states.

Moving between figuration and abstraction, Manning situates the human presence within broader relationships of landscape, climate and the natural world, allowing forms to surface, dissolve and reappear across layered fields. From monumental canvases to more intimate works, coastal luminosity, maritime labor and meteorological phenomena meet ethereal atmospheres, ancestral knowledge and echoes of Greek mythologies.

In an Overcast Sky approaches topography as autobiography. The landscapes of Alaska and Mexico, where Manning grew up and worked on commercial fishing boats, enter her work through light, labor, temperature and seasonal rhythms: the cold pink of an Alaskan winter, tidal navigation, the physical pull of a boat against open water, the force of a storm. Geography becomes muscle memory, merging here with the natural light of Athens as it enters the gallery.

About the Artist

Raised between the freezing coasts of Juneau, Alaska, and the sun-baked landscapes of Mexico, Kylie Manning draws upon a profound sensitivity to the elemental forces of landscape, light, and time.

Manning’s paintings unfold through an intensely physical and iterative process of hand-prepared grounds, chromatic layering, and continual reworking. Using safflower and walnut oil to separate layers of pigment and refract light from within, she builds surfaces that accumulate with geological patience. Figures emerge and dissolve back into the landscape, occupying a space between presence and disappearance. Created without preparatory sketches or predetermined compositions, the paintings are discovered through the act of making itself, inviting viewers into a similar process of perception and revelation. Balancing intimacy and sublimity, Manning’s work transforms the painting into an open, unresolved field where memory, sensation, and form remain in constant negotiation.

Manning’s recent solo exhibitions include Traces of the Body at Villa Schöningen, Potsdam (2025 – 26), Yellow Sea at Space K, Seoul (2024), Sea Change at X Museum, Beijing (2023 – 24), and Zweisamkeit – Being in Two Is No More Than Doubled Solitude at Anonymous Gallery, New York (2021). Her work has also been featured in numerous international group exhibitions, including Beyond Form at LVH Art, Mumbai (2025), Wild: Women Abstractionists on Nature at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (2024), and PRESENT ’23: Building the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art (2023). Her work is held in major institutional collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, X Museum, Yuz Museum, and Long Museum.

Learn More

Through Manning’s choice of materials and process of mark-making, different senses of time and movement coexist on the canvas. Iron oxide, volcanic ash, crushed stone and galvanized bone carry their own material histories, shaped by pressure, heat and transformation. She combines these substances with gestures ranging from slow, layered applications to immediate, rapid marks. The physical qualities of landscape become closely connected to the movement of the body: a painted gesture can suggest both a bodily action, such as the movement of an elbow, and a geographical form, such as an opening towards the sea.

Akis Kokkinos, curator, reflects on the exhibition: “Within the density of central Athens, the exhibition becomes a space of withdrawal – a temporary shelter where visitors are invited to explore the symbiotic and continuous relationship we hold with the land, nature and the universe. Bodies, memories and landscapes overlap, their boundaries and frames becoming less distinct, like forms glimpsed through an overcast sky.”

In an Overcast Sky is curated by Akis Kokkinos.

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