Artists

Kylie Manning

Press release

Pace will present The Mudlarkers, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Kylie Manning, at its London gallery from October 13 through November 14. In these paintings, Manning embraces an intensity of color and compositional movement to create works held at the apex of a tide, where one state has not yet yielded to the next. Marking her first solo exhibition in London, The Mudlarkers represents a continuation of Manning's ongoing practice of creating site-specific paintings attuned to the unique histories and atmospheres of their destinations. Here, she incorporates Hampshire and London clay, along with silt from the River Thames, into her pigments, drawing on the local tradition of mudlarking, which dates to the late eighteenth century. Scavenging the banks of the Thames at low tide, mudlarkers once searched for objects of value to sell; today, they seek the historical artifacts—Roman coins, pottery shards, tobacco pipes, and other centuries-old fragments—that the river's mud has preserved. "This notion of mudlarking shares a peculiar search with painting: a faith in the nearly visible, in something of value just beneath the surface," Manning says. "You return to a site with a kind of devotion, searching and erasing through its sediment, waiting for something to disclose itself. It is an excavation made partly in the dark—digging through a mental geology with no certainty that anything will answer you."