Dancing Between Abstraction and Figuration

Populated with tangled, genderless bodies moving through dreamlike spaces, Kylie Manning’s paintings have a distinctly theatrical edge. Informed by her experiences growing up in Alaska and Mexico, her atmospheric landscapes often capture the light and environments specific to those locations while also recalling the grand 19th century history paintings of Winslow Homer and Gustave Courbet.

Following its run at the X Museum in Beijing, Manning’s solo exhibition Sea Change is on view at our Hong Kong gallery through May 9, 2024. The show features large-scale paintings and a selection of drawings created by the artist last year, after her project with choreographer Christopher Wheeldon for the New York City Ballet. Here, we’re taking a close look at how Manning depicts moments of balance and precarity in her latest body of work, cultivating a sense of constant flux within static, two-dimensional mediums.

Scroll down to listen to conversations between Manning and her longtime friend Ted Barrow, who wrote an essay on the artist for Pace Publishing’s new catalogue accompanying Sea Change.

The works that Manning is presenting in Sea Change reflect her deep interest in enactments of fluctuation, of cohesion and fragmentation. These radiant new paintings were made in the last year, on the heels of her collaboration with Christopher Wheeldon for the New York City Ballet production From You Within Me, for which she made monumental stage backdrops and designed costumes.

The drawings in Sea Change are gestural studies of motion that Manning sketched in real-time as she watched rehearsals for the ballet a year ago. Each of these staccatoed maps of movement is an ode to a specific time, place, and performance, and each is named for a different dancer in Wheeldon’s cast.

Not only do Manning’s latest works hinge on formal enactments of change, but they are deeply linked to a project—and a period of the artist’s life—rife with other kinds of transformations. The artist’s stage backdrops responding to the music of From You Within Me gave way to the choreography of the ballet, which in turn informed Manning’s work with the New York City Ballet’s famed costume department. With Sea Change, these encounters between art, dance, music, and costume are transfigured into an entirely new body of paintings and drawings.

Sea Change, as an exhibition, has itself moved through different spaces and iterations. The show debuted at the X Museum in Beijing in December 2023 and, following its run at Pace in Hong Kong, it will be on view at Space K in Seoul starting in August 2024. With this tour through East Asia, Manning is presenting her first-ever solo shows in each of these three cities.