Event

On Friday, July 18 from 6:00 to 9:00PM, Storm King Art Center invites you to enjoy an intimate seasonal dinner paired with an artist talk by Kylie Manning.

Storm King Table offers a unique opportunity to share a meal and conversation in a setting that encourages quiet connection and deep engagement with art in nature. The evening begins with cocktails in our landscape, followed by a fresh summer dinner prepared by Kitchen Sink at the Outdoor Café in our North Woods. Over dinner, Manning will reflect on her influences, practice, and the role of landscape in shaping creative work.

Your participation supports Storm King’s mission to foster ambitious artistic practices and create transformative experiences with art and the landscape.

Tickets start at $275 per person.

Extend your support of Storm King. Sponsorships available starting at $3,000.

Kylie Manning (b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska) is a mid-career painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is heavily informed by the atmospheres, latitudes, and colors present in the various geographies of her childhood. Using brushwork, light, and balance, the artist captures moments within her personal history, such as her time working on Alaskan fishing boats and memories of surfing in Mexico. Through her practice, Manning re-contextualizes the concept of traditionally gendered “masterpieces” with an eye toward contemporary feminism, and her visual lexicon is as much in conversation with J.M.W. Turner and Frans Hals as it is Ruth Asawa and Berthe Morisot. Manning’s oil paint compositions center on ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures within expansive, disparate landscapes. She purposefully leaves the origin, gender, and raison d’être of the forms within her paintings up to interpretation, allowing the viewer to step into her world, yet form their own reading of the work. The resulting works vibrate with energy and light, flickering before the viewer’s eyes.

Manning explores the balance between figuration and abstraction through expert draftsmanship, painting, mark-making, and a refined technical process. Within her painting practice, the artist begins each body of work as a family, stretching the surfaces and employing rabbit skin glue, which primes the canvas and provides a buoyant backdrop. She spends a great deal of time spreading oil ground (a material used to prime oil paintings) with a palette knife, before sanding down each layer, building a relationship to each individual piece before she brings in color. She is acutely aware of the scale, energy, and groove of the linen before ‘beginning.’ When Manning eventually incorporates color, it begins through a hierarchy of refracted light. She grinds pure pigments with safflower oil and starts with a Sumi-e-like wash using broad chip brushes and paint rollers to create thin but wide strokes. While still wet, she takes a rag and begins to pull the composition out by wiping and ripping away saturated areas. Eventually sketching in paint with loaded brushes, she reiterates or shifts the composition. Each layer is separated with a slightly thicker layer of safflower and walnut oil to refract light, a technique common with Dutch Baroque painters, such as Johannes Vermeer. Orchestrating ethereal sketches of landscapes and figures, she balances delicate whirlwinds of color with a contemporary feminist sense of humor. Manning’s works feel simultaneously thin and radiant, light glowing from within the paintings themselves.

Recent one-artist exhibitions of her work include Kylie Manning: Waldeinsamkeit, KN Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2017); Kylie Manning: Zweisamkeit – Being in Two Is No More Than

Doubled Solitude, Anonymous Gallery, New York (2021); Kylie Manning: Both Sides Now, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Kylie Manning: You Into Me, Me Into You, Pace Gallery, Geneva (2023); Kylie Manning: Sea Change, X Museum, Beijing (2023–2024), which traveled to Pace Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); and Kylie Manning: Yellow Sea, Space K, Seoul (2024). Kylie Manning: Sea Change was accompanied by Manning’s first catalogue from Pace Publishing and features an essay by art historian and writer Ted Barrow as well as images and full-bleed details of Manning’s recent works and projects. Her work is held in numerous collections worldwide including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; X Museum, Beijing, China; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.