Painting from (Past) Life

When choreographer Christopher Wheeldon first saw Kylie Manning’s paintings, he was instantly struck by their “abandoned, biblical” quality—an apt observation that these canvases of crystalline sweeps, in which the gestural and figural weave and writhe about, command an elemental vastness. In 2023, Wheeldon invited Manning to collaborate on a new stage production for the New York City Ballet; the artist’s iconic landscapes were transferred onto two monumental scrims commensurate with the entire proscenium, at roughly 30 by 56 feet. Mid-performance, a switch in stage lighting renders the front scrim near-transparent, revealing the second layer further upstage and transforming atmospheric tides of malachite and cobalt into tormented strands of magenta, emerald, and ochre. Like majestic weather, they envelop the diverse cast of dancers—uniformly clad in burnt orange unitards designed by Manning—who punctuate the torrential forces with the momentum of psyche and desire. Aglow in androgynous sensuality, as the figures often are in Manning’s paintings, the dancers maneuver solo, in pairs, or as picturesque ensembles that huddle, tear away, and yearn. The very tension between absorption and emergence, too, mirrors Manning’s calibration of the body within abstract mark-making, in which portrayals of clear identities or characters give way to a “presence” that teases, surprises, and haunts.

While this scenographic collaboration belongs to an exuberant tradition of visual artists partaking in the total world-building of dance and theater—counting precedents like Marc Chagall for Fire Bird, Isamu Noguchi for Orpheus, or Alexander Calder for various Martha Graham pieces—Wheeldon’s From You Within Me (set to Arnold Schoenberg’s score Verklärte Nacht, or “transfigured night”) goes one step further in that Manning’s unique painterly practice is the source from which choreography derives its topographical, allegorical, and visceral resonances, as well as its capacity for storytelling and commitment to being unresolved. The scale of theater, in turn, serves as a useful reminder that Manning’s paintings are meant to be moved through and contended with, in the same way the artist contends with surface and process: brushstrokes accrue into strata; scraping and sanding reveal chromatic chronologies; washes dissolve into negative space at their edges, juxtaposing the lines and smudges of drawing that chart their own palimpsest-like cadence. For Manning, time is not illustrated but “embedded” in the action of working and reworking of canvas, “so that intimacy emerges through labor rather than image.”

Here, topography and labor reveal a deeper autobiography. While gestural passages evocative of tides and embankments may not specifically depict the coasts of Mexico and Alaska, where the artist grew up surfing and learning the trade of commercial fishing, the “coastal light, maritime labor, and seasonal rhythms” inform her sensibility, as well as her palette, like the cold pink of freezing Alaskan winters. This seduction by—and piety toward—the elements can indeed carry biblical or Romantic connotations. At the same time, the labor-intensity of Manning’s process speaks to another crucial aspect of her biography: muscle memory, be it emulation or perversion of art historical precedents, attunement to tidal navigation, or the tug of force on fishing boats. Landscapes rupture and flay open like bodily wounds. The simultaneity of agony and release, a proposition that characterizes many of Manning’s paintings, is as grounded in profoundly physical stakes as it is in emotional and conceptual ones.

Recognizing herself as having become “less an image-maker than a keeper of the tide,” Manning wants the paintings to offer “just enough structure to orient oneself, then require attunement.” The canvases teem with associative evocations: deep time, prehistoric ruin, meteorological events, or the terror and fantasy of the psyche, making them especially generative collaborators. To the artist’s mind, the viewer “becomes a tracker—someone following movement with partial information, using traces and footholds rather than clarity to find their way”; they, too, populate the terrain with projections of myths and memories.

The paintings do, however, tether more concretely to geography and land in the way materials are made and selected. Manning’s 2024 presentation, Yellow Sea, in Seoul’s Space K, took its point of departure from the volatile collision between saltwater and freshwater in the region, where convergence and demarcation paradoxically coexist. Her New York solo debut at Pace Gallery in spring 2025 saw the artist making new pigments with local minerals—tourmaline, calcite, and quartz—that pulsate with the city’s geological history and eternal urgency. For her presentation at Zona Maco, the artist has opted for a palette rich in “light sienna, burnt umber, natural umber, and red ochre,” drawn from local soil and clay deposits. The way the figures remain on the threshold of corporeality speaks to a fascination with notions of the afterlife in Latin American visual, literary, and vernacular imagination.

Manning is no stranger to being among ghosts, after all: the artist’s first comprehensive exhibition in Germany, which opened in late 2025 at Villa Schöningen, situates her practice in intimate dialogues with the institution’s own collection of works by Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray, Egon Schiele, and Rembrandt van Rijn. Titled Traces of the Body, the exhibition proposes the body as a vessel for narrating and contesting reality. As a younger painter, Manning had spent two years as a student in Leipzig, not far from Villa Schöningen. There, a distinct lineage of figuration, fused with Surrealism’s potential for the enigmatic and the political, never ceased to resonate with Manning. She often speaks of her figures as “past lives,” in the sense of embodiment rather than mere representation, because the materials favored to portray these remnants of faces and limbs, be it charcoal or volcanic ash—a new addition in her Zona Maco paintings—are derived from prolonged natural processes of burning and condensation. That their forging is volatile and violent mesmerizes Manning, who then alchemizes them toward evocations of care, protection, and endurance.