KYLIE MANNING: SEA CHARGE
Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Kylie Manning in Hong Kong. Exploring enactments of movement and accumulation as they relate to luminosity and abstraction, the works in the exhibition were all created by the artist in the last year.
March 26 – May 9, 2024
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 that blur boundaries. 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 capture the light and environments specific to those locations.
The artist’s forthcoming exhibition with the gallery has been conceived as part of a tour throughout East Asia that includes presentations at the X Museum in Beijing, Pace in Hong Kong, and an expanded iteration at Space K Seoul, opening in August. The show at Pace’s gallery in H Queen’s will feature five large-scale paintings and a group of related drawings. She produced this body of work following her monumental collaboration with choreographer Christopher Wheeldon for the New York City Ballet in 2023.
In Manning’s own words, the “volume has been turned up” with respect to velocity and vibrancy in this new body of work. Her rapid brushstrokes suggest both a push and a pull, wherein the abstract elements that coalesce into figurations also threaten to obliterate the narrative scenes they compose.
Among the paintings in Manning’s show at Pace in Hong Kong is Metronome (2023), a composition that reflects her uncanny ability to convey a sense of change and open-endedness in a two-dimensional, static medium. Here, figures morph in and out of different identities and time stamps amid the external chaos of their environment.
With Undertow (2023), the most abstract painting in the exhibition, Manning meditates on the simultaneous abundance and violence of the natural world, imbuing her brushstrokes with a tangible mercuriality. Each of the painted works in the Hong Kong presentation invites engagement and exchange with the viewer, who must dance between the artist’s marks to decipher hidden realms within her canvases.
Manning’s works on paper included in the show are gestural studies of motion that shed light on the draftsmanship in her paintings, which she considers drawings rendered in oil. She created this group of sketches in real time as she watched rehearsals for Wheeldon’s New York City Ballet production last year, and each of these 12 works is named for a dancer in that cast.