JILL MULLEADY

Early Years

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1980, Jill Mulleady grew up in Buenos Aires and later Switzerland. Her multicultural upbringing and frequent relocations have informed the disjointed spatial sensibility that characterises her works. Mulleady studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London before completing her MFA at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She is currently based in Los Angeles, a city whose layered landscapes and cinematic unreality often echo through her artworks.

Artworks

Mulleady’s paintings situate themselves between personal memory and collective myth, often inhabiting dreamlike scenes filled with spectral figures, hybrid creatures, and unsettling domestic spaces.

Emotional Landscapes

In her earlier body of work, Jill Mulleady developed a distinctive visual language marked by elongated, introspective figures placed in charged, often claustrophobic interiors. These contemporary artworks reflect personal vulnerability and transformation, sometimes incorporating mirrored versions of the artist herself. Mulleady draws on influences from Symbolism and Expressionism, channelling figures like Edvard Munch and Balthus. Her compositions evoke emotional ambiguity, using theatrical lighting, deep shadows, and recurring motifs such as windows and doorways to suggest transitional or liminal states. In these emotionally saturated paintings, solitude, eroticism, and decay coexist, capturing the psychic undercurrents of everyday life. These early works laid the foundation for her ongoing interrogation of identity and narrative within contemporary painting.

Dialogue with Art History

Jill Mulleady’s work is defined by a bold engagement with the history of art, reworking the iconography and formal devices of Old Master painting through a contemporary lens. In We Wither Time into a Coil of Fright (2019), exhibited in the Uruguayan Pavilion at the 58thVenice Biennale, Mulleady reimagined the composition and grandeur of Baroque painting to reflect present-day psychological dislocation. Her artworks often draw on the visual vocabularies of El Greco, Francisco Goya, and James Ensor, yet they are populated by figures bearing smartphones, contemporary clothing, or ambiguous expressions of desire and dread. This synthesis of historical technique and modern anxiety results in a hallucinatory visual field where time collapses. Through these layered gestures, Mulleady reasserts the enduring relevance of painting in the digital age.

Urban Spectres

In more recent years, Mulleady has turned her attention to the emotional residue of public spaces, focusing on urban ruin, ecological precarity, and collective trauma. Her contemporary paintings present dense cityscapes haunted by zombie-like figures, mythological hybrids, and ghostly apparitions. Influenced by her current base in Los Angeles, these works depict freeways, overpasses, and vacant lots reimagined as theatrical stages for existential drama. Jewel-toned palettes and uncanny lighting lend the works an atmosphere of feverish unreality. The figures appear trapped in a loop—half-human, half-spectre—evoking the psychological fallout of modernity and mass alienation. These artworks reflect Mulleady’s ongoing interest in how social collapse and environmental crisis manifest in the collective unconscious, filtered through the medium of contemporary painting.

Exhibitions

Jill Mulleady has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at major international institutions.

Solo Exhibitions

• Fear of Losing You, EDD: Me Time, Luma Arles, Arles (2024)
• Blood Fog, Consortium Museum, Dijon (2021)
• We Wither Time into a Coil of Fright, Public Art Installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020)
• Angst vor Angst, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2017)
• Fear, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (2015)

Group Exhibitions

• In the House of the Trembling Eye: an exhibition staged by Allison Katz, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2024)
• Des corps, des écritures, Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, Paris (2022)
• Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Huntington, San Marino (2021)
• May You Live In Interesting Times, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019)
• Feel the Sun In Your Mouth, Hirshhorn, Washington DC (2019)

Instagram

Jill Mulleady’s Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Mulleady’s work has been discussed in major art publications including Art Basel, Frieze, and Hyperallergic.

Jill Mulleady FAQs

Ocula | 2025