Last updated: 11 November 2026
By Tristan · Arts, exhibitions and creative culture
This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute professional advice.
Cool Factor: 2/5
Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers reviewExhibition / Pace London
I went to see Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers at Pace on Thursday afternoon. It was bonfire night, and also the day Regent Street switched on its Christmas lights, so it involved a fair amount of wading through crowds already milling about, waiting for the angels to light up.
This is the Brooklyn painter's first solo show in London, and Pace says she mixed Thames silt and London clay into the paint. This is where the interest began and ended for me. Having a material attitude (think Richard Long using River Avon mud) is fine, but here it seems to do the heavy lifting for a series of weak and derivative paintings that punch well above their weight. They are big sweeps of green, pink and rust that borrow the look of Turner (and that is a stretch) and the vocabulary of abstraction without the substance of either. If you want to see the kind of painting Kylie Manning aspires to make, go and look at Joan Mitchell's magnificent Iva (1973) at Tate Modern. The Mudlarkers is free until 14 November 2026.
01 / The show
What's on in Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers?
Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers is a show of new paintings, all from 2026, at Pace's London gallery from 13 October to 14 November 2026. Entry is free. The title comes from mudlarking, the now highly popular activity of searching the Thames foreshore at low tide. According to Pace's exhibition page, it goes back to the late eighteenth century, when the poorest Londoners scavenged the mud for anything they could sell. Today's mudlarks look for Roman coins, clay pipes and broken pottery. There are books on it too, the best known being Lara Maiklem's Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames (2019), a Sunday Times bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.
Manning ties her paintings to that tradition through what is in them. She mixed Hampshire and London clay, plus silt from the Thames, into her pigments. On the biggest painting, Eyes only, Marc Glimcher's catalogue essay lists oil alongside charcoal, graphite, Hampshire chalk, quartz, pyrite, calcium carbonate and iron oxides as materials used.
Glimcher refers to Eyes only as the main work of the show. It runs across three canvases and roughly six metres, about 20 feet. A faint horizon near the top divides a pale pink sky from the green that fills the rest. Below that line, the paint churns into what the essay describes as a stormy sea of green swells.
The essay compares the small box-like marks along the horizon to the pen strokes Rembrandt used for fences and buildings in his winter landscapes. Standing in front of it, I could not make that comparison hold any water, another real stretch in the work here. A Rembrandt mark describes something with speed and assurance. Manning's dabs sit on the surface and could mean anything. The size of the painting is impressive, full props for going at it, but what happens inside it is a lot of energetic brushwork that never settles into a competent painting.
Cloven rock takes its title from Robert Frost's poem Two Tramps in Mud Time, where a block of oak splits cleanly under the axe. It has a mass of scratchy green and blue drawing on the left and a pale see-through band on the right. Glimcher writes that the band sits where Manning completely painted out a figure. Is this meant to be a revelation? Without the essay, nothing on the canvas tells you either thing.
Puestero is the rust-red painting on Pace's exhibition page, with a scraped, worn-down surface. The title refers to the ranch hands of Patagonia who look after land they will never own. Glimcher compares these scraped works to Clyfford Still. The names keep coming! Still built his surfaces into hard, jagged fields with real weight, colour nuance and scale. Puestero looks like a wash that has been rubbed back.
A mouth open towards the light, the orange and blue diptych and the purple canvas all follow the same recipe. They have diagonal sweeps, charcoal scratches across the top and a hint of a limb or a face if you go looking for one. Walking from one room to the next, I could have swapped any two of them round without the show changing.
A mouth open towards the light is the one painting where a figure clearly survives. In the right-hand panel, a face and a bare shoulder surface near the top, wrapped in a swirl of turquoise. It is a direct line back to her earlier canvases, which Pace's artist page describes as built around "ethereal, gestural, and genderless figures". Here, though, the figure doesn't add anything to the composition beyond being a bridge between the old and newer way of working.
02 / The trend
Crap-straction: why it all looks so familiar
There is a lot of this kind of painting around at the moment. I call it crap-straction, though I am sure this colloquialism has been around a fair old while: large, loose canvases of gestural colour that look like mid-century abstract painting from a distance and dissolve into noise up close. It usually comes from painters younger than Manning, and it is everywhere in commercial galleries and art fairs at the moment because it photographs well and fills a big wall, no questions asked.
The common thread is that the work leans on the look of serious painting instead of the decisions behind it. The colour is lush, the gestures are big, and the press text throws in enough references (Turner, Rembrandt etc.) that most people will have heard of. Manning is mid-career, with years of figurative painting behind her, which makes it more disappointing that this show lands in the same place.
Local material has become part of the pitch, too. This autumn, Lucy Dodd's show at Sprüth Magers, a few streets away, was also sold on ground-in local pigment, in her case peat from the Moray coast. Earth from a place makes a good press release, but it rarely changes what the painting looks like.
03 / The references
The art history is in the press text, not the paint
The essay and the press release name Turner, Rembrandt, Clyfford Still, Vermeer's layered oils, Robert Frost and Marcel Duchamp. Pace's biography of her adds Frans Hals, Berthe Morisot and Ruth Asawa. That is a heavy list, and Manning's paintings do not stand up to this line-up.
Turner's storms are urgent, felt and intense: the light has a source, the sea has a direction, a ship or steam train is somewhere specific. Still's surfaces are worked until they feel visceral. Here, the references sit in the writing and the canvases supply the mood. You can name-check Turner over a green swirl, but that does not make the swirl a storm. For me, that gap between the reading list and the result is the core problem with Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers.
04 / The gallery
Pace at 5 Hanover Square
Pace is one of the largest commercial galleries, with spaces in seven cities from New York to Tokyo. Because it is a commercial gallery, the paintings are for sale. Prices are not on Pace's website, so you would need to ask.
The catalogue essay comes from Marc Glimcher, Pace's chief executive, so it is the gallery making the case for its own artist. Its closing pitch is blunt: "These paintings are for believers, not doubters." I am a doubter, and the paintings did nothing to change that.
The building itself may not be Pace's London home for much longer. According to Artnet, Pace put the Hanover Square property on the market in June and plans to move to a smaller space nearby in 2027. Its UK company lost $5.4 million in 2025.
05 / The artist
Who is Kylie Manning?
Manning was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1983 and grew up between Alaska and Mexico. Glimcher writes that she spent years as a commercial salmon fisherman before she painted full time. She studied philosophy and visual art at Mount Holyoke College, then took an MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2010, with time in Leipzig alongside the New Leipzig School. She lives in Brooklyn.
Her career with Pace has moved quickly. According to her Pace artist page, she had solo shows with the gallery in Los Angeles (2022), Geneva (2023) and New York (2025), and Sea Change travelled to Pace Hong Kong in 2024 after opening at the X Museum in Beijing. She has also had museum shows in Seoul and Potsdam. Her work is in collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Long Museum in Shanghai. Pace calls her a mid-career painter. This is her first solo show in London, after group shows there including Victoria Miro in 2024 and Pippy Houldsworth in 2025.
06 / What didn't work
What doesn't work in Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers
The invisible Thames. The clay and silt are the show's selling point, and you cannot see them. Earth pigments read as browns, rusts and greys like any other, so nothing on the wall tells you this mud came from the Thames. The London connection lives in the press text and in Pace's short film of Manning on the foreshore.
The vanishing figures. Manning's figures used to be a compositional focus for her work. Glimcher calls the half-melted bodies the power source of her paintings, then concedes that in these works the resting places for the eye are scarce, and in some there are none. Once the figures go, nothing is left to hold the paintings together.
The repeated method. This is her fifth solo show with Pace in five years, and the building blocks have barely changed: figure studies buried under washes, diagonal fields of colour, charcoal lines scratched across the top. The press release calls the work site-specific. It looks like the same paintings with a new postcode.
Structurally, a single commercial show will always be narrower than a museum survey, and that is not the fault here. The fault is that the work does not match the claims made for it.
07 / Context
Why Kylie Manning matters now
The subject is topical. Mudlarking grew so popular that the Port of London Authority paused new permits in 2022, then reopened applications in October 2024 after reviewing the scheme with the Crown Estate, Historic England and the London Museum. You can walk on the foreshore without a permit, but you cannot dig, scrape or search.
The timing also matters for Pace. With the Hanover Square lease up for sale, this show is one of the last in that building, and a first London solo is the kind of show a gallery uses to make a statement. Manning's Athens show, In an Overcast Sky, runs at the same time at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation, from 6 October 2026 into February 2027.
08 / Value
Is Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers worth the trip?
Entry is free and the gallery is a few minutes from Oxford Circus, so it costs you twenty minutes at most. However, I would not cross London for it.
If you are in Mayfair anyway, spend the time on something stronger. The Magritte show at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, which we scored 5/5 in our review of This Is Still Not a Pipe, is also free and runs until 12 December 2026. And if the Turner comparison is what drew you in, go and see the real thing in the free collections at Tate Britain and the National Gallery. Our page on the Fighting Temeraire print covers the National Gallery Shop versions from £25.
09 / Practical info
Visiting Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers
- Dates: 13 October to Saturday 14 November 2026.
- Where: Pace, 5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ.
- Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.
- Price: Free entry.
- Getting there: Oxford Circus is a short walk away, and Bond Street station has an Elizabeth line entrance on Hanover Square. Allow extra time around Regent Street during the Christmas season.
- Access: For step-free details, email [email protected] or call +44 (0)20 3206 7600.
For her biography, her other shows and where her work sells, see our Kylie Manning artist page.
10 / The verdict
The verdict on Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers
Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers arrives with Thames mud in the paint, Turner and Rembrandt in the essay, and Frost and Duchamp in the titles and press text. On the wall, it is a room of large, loose green and rust abstracts that look like plenty of other paintings on the market right now. The London material makes no visible difference, the figures have all but gone, and the art history stays in the writing.
Cool Factor
★★☆☆☆
2 out of 5
That makes it a 2/5 Lukewarm. It scrapes above 1/5 because it is free, a few minutes from Oxford Circus, and the idea of painting with the Thames has something in it, even if the paintings never show it. It falls short of 3/5 because every painting here is weak and derivative, and none of them earns the comparisons the gallery makes for it. If you are already battling the Regent Street crowds before 14 November, you can duck in for ten minutes. Otherwise, you are not missing anything.
FAQs
Is Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers worth seeing?
Not unless you are nearby. We gave it 2/5. The paintings are large and colourful, but they are weak and derivative, and the Thames clay in the paint makes no difference you can see.
How much does Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers cost?
Nothing. Entry to Pace's London gallery is free. The paintings are for sale, but Pace does not publish prices online.
When does Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers close?
Saturday 14 November 2026. Pace is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm.
Where is Pace Gallery in London?
At 5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ, near Oxford Circus. Pace plans to move to a smaller space nearby in 2027.
What is mudlarking, and can I try it?
Mudlarking means searching the Thames foreshore at low tide for old objects. You need a Port of London Authority permit to search, dig or scrape. Without one, you can walk on the foreshore but not search it.
Who is Kylie Manning?
She is a painter born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1983 and based in Brooklyn. Pace represents her, and this is her first solo exhibition in London.
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