Kylie Manning Shares Intimate Landscapes ‘In an Overcast Sky’

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Kylie Manning will present her first institutional solo exhibition in Greece at the B & M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music in Athens, with In an Overcast Sky, running until February 21, 2027.

Curated by Akis Kokkinos, the exhibition brings together works created specifically for the occasion alongside loans from Pace Gallery and private collections. Spanning the Foundation’s second floor, it creates an immersive environment in which painting becomes a meeting point for landscape, memory, movement and the forces of nature.

Landscapes shaped by memory and experience

Raised between the freezing coasts of Juneau, Alaska, and the sun-baked landscapes of Mexico, Manning draws on the environments that shaped her upbringing and experience. Her work also reflects her time working on commercial fishing boats, translating the physical realities of maritime labor, changing weather and coastal life into painterly forms.

In In an Overcast Sky, geography becomes a form of autobiography. The cold pink hues of an Alaskan winter, the rhythms of the tides, the movement of a boat through open water and the force of a storm all inform paintings that explore how places become embedded in the body and its memory.

These experiences meet the natural light of Athens within the gallery, connecting distant landscapes through atmosphere, sensation and movement.

Moving between figuration and abstraction, Manning places the human presence within a wider relationship with the natural world. Figures and forms emerge, dissolve and reappear across layered surfaces, blurring the boundaries between bodies and landscapes. Monumental canvases and more intimate works bring together coastal light, maritime labor, meteorological phenomena, ancestral knowledge and echoes of Greek mythology.

An exploration of material, time and movement

Manning’s approach to painting combines a physical process of mark-making with an interest in the histories carried by materials. Iron oxide, volcanic ash, crushed stone and galvanized bone feature in her work, bringing substances shaped by pressure, heat and transformation into dialogue with the act of painting.

She combines these materials with gestures that range from slow, layered applications to rapid, immediate marks. Through this process, the physical qualities of the landscape become intertwined with bodily movement. A painted stroke might evoke the motion of an elbow while simultaneously suggesting a geographical form, such as an opening towards the sea.

Her paintings develop through repeated applications and reworking rather than predetermined compositions. Hand-prepared grounds and layers of color create surfaces in which light appears to emerge from within the paint. The resulting images remain open and unresolved, allowing memory, sensation and form to shift continually between presence and disappearance.

This interplay of material and movement gives the exhibition its distinctive atmosphere, inviting visitors to consider landscape not simply as a view to be observed but as an experience shaped by the body, time and memory.

An international practice

Manning’s exhibition in Athens follows a series of solo presentations at international venues. Her recent exhibitions include Traces of the Body at Villa Schöningen in Potsdam (2025–26), Yellow Sea at Space K in Seoul (2024), Sea Change at X Museum in Beijing (2023–24) and Zweisamkeit – Being in Two Is No More Than Doubled Solitude at Anonymous Gallery in New York (2021).

Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions, including Beyond Form at LVH Art in Mumbai (2025), Wild: Women Abstractionists on Nature at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (2024) and PRESENT ’23: Building the Scantland Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art (2023).

Her paintings are held in institutional collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, X Museum, Yuz Museum and Long Museum.

Information

Kylie Manning: In an Overcast Sky

Dates: October 6, 2026–February 21, 2027

Venue: B & M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music, Athens

Opening hours: Monday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Thursday, 10 a.m.–8 p.m.

Curator-led tours: Thursday, November 5, at 6 p.m., and Saturday, February 20, at noon.