Inside Kylie Manning’s ‘There Is Something That Stays’ at Pace Gallery

A few days before the opening of her latest exhibition at Pace gallery in New York, Kylie Manning was observing the changing light of early spring. Dayling-saving time had recently set in, and she had stayed late at the gallery the night before to see how the absence of natural light entering the room through the skylight or glass windows shifted the balance of her paintings. 

“As I’m painting, the season that we’re in always is affecting things; the quality of light we have, all of that is a big chunk of it,” she says. “So you’ll see if a cloud passes by, that painting will do a jellyfish, or orb up and down based on the light changing.”

Entering the gallery, visitors are confronted with the range of Manning’s color palette, and by extension, a sense of seasonality. The series of large-scale paintings in “There Is Something That Stays” reflect a sense of time and place, embedded in their physical composition and thematic influences. 

“I always try really hard to make sure that it feels like the paintings are going home to where they’re being shown,” she says. “So I include, for wherever a show is going to, the materials from its area.” The bedrock of New York elements for the Pace show is quartz, tourmaline and calcite, which have been ground into the pigment. The varying coarseness creates another layer of texture within the paintings, where corporeal forms have been stacked and obscured by energetic markings.

“It creates this tidal effect,” she says of the swaths of mineral-laden paint in “Kairos,” a triptych installed in the center of the room. “As they wash in and out they kind of bury previous drawings, so the paintings feel like they’re filled of these souls of past lives by these tides washing them in and out.”

For Manning, people are another material linked to geography: “New York is so much about the people that bring us here,” she says. “So I wanted to rely both on the models, and then on the literal materials of where we are.”

 ”I can only paint people that I really love or really admire,” she adds. “But they never end up remaining. It’s really important that the figures always remain a bit open and androgynous and just not nailed in, so that everybody can  participate a little bit more fully. Often times, it makes you stand still and you have to decide whether or not the eye standing still helps the painting or hurts the painting.”

Figurative gestures are embedded in each painting, although the specific details of the figures become apparent through time spent looking at the works and proximity to the canvas. 

“They come and go. Some will pop forward. You’ll find hands or faces leading into other ones,” says Manning, gesturing to details within the cool-hued painting, “Years Are Prowling.” “Some people see this as a hand, and that as a profile, or a hand down here. They never totally add up, but they’re kind of building the painting below. So it’s more like the jumping off point,” she continues. “Rather than being like ‘now I understand the narrative,’ it’s more that we understand the energy or the mood.”

The title of the show, “There Is Something That Stays,” is borrowed from the penultimate line of a Jorge Luis Borges poem that reflects on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was the source of the “you can’t step in the same river twice” metaphor. The concept of change threads throughout Manning’s paintings, which are kinetic and feel as though constantly in flux even in their final form. While influenced by specific seasons, each spring painting is different from the next one. 

For her latest body of work, Manning, a new mother, found herself reflecting on the cognitive shift that follows the birth of a baby. “I have a little baby and she is so different every single day,” she says. “That made me really hyper aware of time and this tragedy of how fleeting it is, because we are supposed to be celebrating every minute with them, but we don’t get to mourn the fact that they aren’t who they were the day before.”

She was thinking about all of that while reading the Borges poem, which is about “the rapidness of time and how these things are rushing past us, but there’s always something that stays,” she says. “And so I wanted to leave us with something a bit more optimistic. That even though things come and go, there are things that stay, that are a bit more archival with time. The figures that are in here are things I’m trying to cherish and give a chance to last in a more glacial way.”

Manning’s titles often reference music and motion; in 2023, she collaborated with choreographer Christopher Wheeldon to create backdrops and costumes for his New York City Ballet production “From You Within Me.” At Pace, her individual painting titles reflect the theme of time and speed: there’s the sienna-hued “Quicksand” and “Kairos,” an exploration of quantitative versus qualitative time. Speaking about the ancient Greek concept, Manning’s purview expands to a celestial scale.

 She likens the experience of motherhood to astronauts seeing the Earth for the first time. “It’s called the Overview Effect. Looking down, seeing the estuaries and the mountains through the clouds, they have a common emotional breakdown — because it’s so beautiful, but it’s also so fragile,” she says. “The Overview Effect is this sense of understanding our fragility…this sense of thinking about how quick and how insignificant we are.”

“The Overview Effect” is also the title of one of Manning’s smallest paintings in the show, located away from the primary exhibition, and a natural light source, on another floor of the gallery. Although admittedly most “at home” when painting at a large scale, Manning is often intentionally working on smaller pieces.

“ It’s just very rare that I can get the same energy down to such an intimate size,” says Manning, glancing at “The Overview Effect.” 

“ The scale is shifting; we can’t quite see if we’re getting a bird’s eye view or looking from below or across the horizon,” she says, taking in the composition. “ Every piece has to resolve and find itself with the viewer and in front of the viewer. And small ones tend to reveal themselves at their own speed.”