Caught in the Current

The feathery yet forceful brushstrokes across Kylie Manning’s crisp, white canvas backdrops recall the vast stretches of deep sea that pervaded the artist’s youth. “I grew up along all of these coasts, from Alaska to Oregon down to Mexico,” says the painter. The daughter of two itinerant art-teacher parents, Manning was born in Juneau, but often found herself on the Mexican coast as a child—from Baja California Sur to San Blas to Puerto Escondido—where her avid surfer father brought his family to chase the waves with him in-between school semesters. Later, she worked on commercial fishing vessels to fund her college education and graduate school.

The artist still holds these memories of the raw power of the ocean—and its distinctly haunted aura—today. In “Sea Change,” her new series, thrashing compositions of faces, limbs, and twisting torsos seem to at once be disappearing and reappearing into a nebulous, dynamic froth across her canvases. The name refers to a “massive shift,” explains Manning. It comprises six large-scale paintings that debuted at Beijing’s X Museum earlier this year. This spring, the works move to Pace Hong Kong, for her third solo exhibition with the gallery she joined in 2022. Its titular work, an 8-foot-tall, more than 12-foot-wide diptych, most loudly embodies the spirit of the series. Crouching, wispy silhouettes embrace each other with intense yet inscrutable emotional undercurrents, amplified by a sweep of watery blue, green, and pink hues that take the eye from the upper left corner down to the lower right, as though the composition itself is a wave cresting and breaking on an unseen surface. Manning, who double majored in philosophy and fine art at Mount Holyoke College before earning her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, wanted to take her traditional training in the fine arts and “apply it to more of these abstract gatherings of what feels like these piles of souls that are flotsams or jetsams,” she says. The artist describes the effect as similar to the detritus left on the beach when the tide pulls back: “What’s left over are these limbs and these bones and these souls of people that we kind of just keep carrying with us.”

Often there are groups of human figures that materialize through the abstract marks in Manning’s paintings. The artist reveals that they “feel like a huddle,” but it is unclear whether these characters are embracing in a manner that is “helpful or hurtful,” she says. “The narrative is not quite clear.” Pointing to one work depicting a flurry of legs floating below a row of faces, Metronome, 2023, the painter reflects: “You get this flicker of almost six legs for what would have been that figure—this feeling of where they were, where they are, where they’re going.”

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"Sea Change" opens on March 26, 2024 at Pace Hong Kong at H Queen's, 80, 12/F Queen's Road Central, Central, Hong Kong.