Kylie Manning is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Both art teachers, Manning’s parents often moved their home in Juneau, Alaska, to various regions in Mexico for extended periods. Manning’s work is heavily informed by the atmospheres, latitudes, and colors present in the various geographies of her childhood, where she witnessed the impacts of social, political, and economic change.
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. Her works primarily originate from within themselves, but she also sources imagery from old family photographs. Her oil paint compositions center on ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures within expansive, disparate landscapes. While some appear more clearly, other figures are defined by lyrical swathes of paint suggesting a face and the outline of a body. Manning purposefully leaves the origin, gender, and raison d’être of the forms within her paintings up to interpretation, allowing the viewer to step into her world, yet form their own reading of the work. The resulting powerful works vibrate with energy and light, flickering before the viewer’s eyes.
Manning explores the balance between figuration and abstraction through expert draftsmanship, painting, mark-making, and a refined technical process. Within her painting practice, the artist begins each body of work as a family, stretching the surfaces and employing rabbit skin glue, which primes the canvas and provides a buoyant backdrop. She spends a great deal of time spreading oil ground (a material used to prime oil paintings) with a palette knife, before sanding down each layer, building a relationship to each individual piece before she brings in color. She is acutely aware of the scale, energy, and groove of the linen before ‘beginning.’ There are no sketches or predetermined compositions; she finds the image with and in front of the viewer so they may determine how the piece was formed.
When Manning eventually incorporates color, it begins through a hierarchy of refracted light. She grinds pure pigments with safflower oil and starts with a Sumi-e-like wash using broad chip brushes and paint rollers to create thin but wide strokes along. While still wet, she takes a rag and begins to pull the composition out by wiping and ripping away saturated areas. Eventually sketching in paint with loaded brushes, she reiterates or shifts the composition. Each layer is separated with a slightly thicker layer of safflower and walnut oil to refract light, a technique common with Dutch Baroque painters, such as Johannes Vermeer. Orchestrating ethereal sketches of landscapes and figures, she balances delicate whirlwinds of color with a contemporary feminist sense of humor. Manning’s works feel simultaneously thin and radiant, light glowing from within the paintings themselves.
Curator and art dealer based in New York City, Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, is Managing Partner and Co-Owner of CANADA. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery. During her time at Pace, Christiana expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Manning in Spring 2022. She also significantly broadened the gallery’s digital native offerings, establishing and activating a robust online sales strategy.
Her curatorial debut at Pace, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, showcased 17 intergenerational artists from the gallery’s program, alongside works by additional artists within her network. This presentation was available for viewing at Pace’s New York gallery space and online.”