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.
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