{"id":2518,"date":"2025-03-26T15:17:48","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T15:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/26\/at-pace-kylie-manning-wields-paint-as-an-alchemical-tool\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T15:17:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T15:17:52","slug":"at-pace-kylie-manning-wields-paint-as-an-alchemical-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/26\/at-pace-kylie-manning-wields-paint-as-an-alchemical-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"At Pace, Kylie Manning Wields Paint as an Alchemical Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cThere is something that stays\u201d is on view through April 19, 2025. Courtesy Pace Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kylie Manning<\/a>\u2019s paintings are forged by a kind of alchemical tension between celestial and terrestrial forces that causes her pigments to gravitate and fluctuate across the canvas until they land, settle and rest as existential traces upon it. That push\/pull made manifest is now on view in the expansive two-location exhibition that marks her New York debut with Pace Gallery following last year\u2019s representation announcement. The show, titled \u201cThere is something that stays,\u201d stands both as a continuation of her exhibition at Space K in Seoul<\/a> and as a testament to a new chapter in life\u2014one marked by the existential and artistic clarity awakened by pregnancy and birth.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI recently had a baby, and it\u2019s really like how someone described it: like astronauts going to outer space and seeing earth for the first time from another perspective,\u201d Manning told Observer ahead of the opening. \u201cIt\u2019s called the overview aspect. They get overwhelmed by its beauty. It\u2019s something very emotional that reveals also our inner fragility against the immensity of the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

She described how the experience of giving birth\u2014of encountering such overwhelming beauty\u2014left her deeply grateful for her own existence. She felt compelled to honor the essence of people and all the life surrounding her, especially given how fleeting time can be. For this series on view at Pace, Manning worked in the studio with models, friends and fellow creatives in the city, seeking to capture the vitality\u2014the \u00e9lan vital\u2014that animates creativity and life itself.<\/p>\n

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Manning pushes painting into a space of existential inquiry, using figuration and abstraction to navigate themes of transformation and impermanence. \u00a9 Meghan Marin<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Still, human subjects are merely a pretext\u2014a point of departure\u2014for Manning, whose paintings remain deliberately suspended between figuration and abstraction. She is more compelled by the invisible systems of interdependent and interconnected forces between bodies, space and nature. \u201cI don\u2019t think of abstraction and figuration as opposites,\u201d she clarified. \u201cIt all depends on the quantity of information. However, figures are such an interesting form, and allow viewers to project themselves into the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Manning describes her process as a tide\u2014paint poured onto the canvas in sweeping whirlwinds, then held in place by rhythmic mark-making that reins in the potential chaos of those movements. The balance between thinner and oil pigment, or the use of pure powdered pigment, determines how far the tide will pull away. From this dynamic exchange, parts of the figure remain while other parts dissolve or are carried off with the current. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of this notion of abstraction as a way covering souls so that those souls can fill and build up the body of work.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Her mark-making, at once energetic and intuitively fluid, channels and activates these movements\u2014flows of matter and energy that, like water<\/keyword>, diverge, merge and vanish. Something always remains while something else is lost. Manning\u2019s works, in this sense, become emotionally and psychologically expansive\u2014radiant, mutable landscapes that translate the fluidity of the world and the systems that bind us to it. This worldview, one that subtly resists the anthropocentric model that has shaped civilization for centuries, is rooted in Manning\u2019s upbringing in Alaska, where nature was an omnipresent force. \u201cI consider myself in nature and connected to nature. Not something separate because I\u2019m unimportant,\u201d she said. That glacial presence is visible in the shimmering, iridescent surfaces of her canvases\u2014like ice in flux, poised between states, always on the edge of becoming something else.<\/p>\n

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The artist\u2019s layered compositions evoke the vastness of natural systems, confronting viewers with a sense of the sublime and the fragility of human existence within it. Courtesy Pace Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Energetically and spiritually dense, Manning\u2019s latest paintings suggest an essential truth about reality\u2019s transitional and interrelational structure, where all things exist in a constant flux of forces and energies. This reality is fleeting\u2014always subject to change, transformation and eventual return\u2014within a perpetual cycle of germination, growth and decay.<\/p>\n

The depth that emerges from these canvases, combined with the bewildering and tempestuous rhythm of their animated gestures, recalls the Romantic notion of the sublime\u2014a sensation that merges awe and fear in the face of nature\u2019s vastness and uncontainable power. That confrontation with grandeur, that brush with something elemental and beyond, invites not only admiration but also terror and spiritual reckoning. It\u2019s a recognition of human fragility in the presence of something enduring, majestic and indifferent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise, then, that Manning describes her practice in terms of ritual\u2014a channeling process through which something universal, intangible and ineffable is unearthed. \u201cPainting is such a mystery,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s about the alchemy, the vision and the magic. Putting together different materials and colors without knowing how they will react. Without knowing whether they will improve or ignite one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this new body of work, Manning pushes her alchemical exploration further, embedding fragments of minerals and natural elements\u2014tourmaline, calcite, quartz\u2014into the very texture of her paintings. Through a delicate interplay of fission and fusion, these surfaces come alive, responding to light and vibrating with a raw intensity.<\/p>\n

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Balancing formal rigor with intuitive spontaneity, the exhibition meditates on the desire to anchor life\u2019s transient beauty in paint. Courtesy Pace Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Balancing formal rigor with intuitive spontaneity, the exhibition meditates on the desire to anchor life\u2019s transient beauty in paint, even as it slips inevitably into change. In doing so, Manning weaves into the work a deep tension between permanence and impermanence, pushing further her exploration of being, existing and experiencing time. Yet rather than drawing any nihilistic conclusion, for Manning this awareness becomes an opportunity\u2014a way to reconsider our position in nature. \u201cOur insignificance is our interconnection. Our ability to understand how unimportant we are is our ability to be more part of a landscape around us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, in both their process and structure, Manning\u2019s paintings confront and embrace the fleeting, rapid nature of experience and the inevitability of continual natural flux. And yet, these works simultaneously seem to hold space for a deeper longing: a desire to anchor, to immortalize, to preserve the miracle of life in two dimensions. To memorialize the beauty of being alive\u2014what lingers, however briefly, from a universe in constant motion\u2014knowing that eternity, in the end, is only ever an illusion.<\/p>\n

\u201cKylie Manning: There is something that stays<\/a>\u201d is on view at Pace, New York (510 & 540 West 25th Street) through April 19, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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