MICHELLE UCKOTTER

Early life and background

Michelle Uckotter was born in 1992 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she completed a BFA in 2015. She later settled in New York, living and working in Brooklyn while developing a distinctive visual language that fuses film, drawing, and painting.

Uckotter originally developed an assemblage-based practice, working with found materials gathered while walking through Baltimore during her studies. This early interest in scavenged imagery and staging laid the groundwork for her later shift into cinematic tableaux, where she constructs sets and directs actors to generate images for her artworks. ​

Michelle Uckotter artworks

Michelle Uckotter’s artworks present suspenseful domestic scenes—hallways, living rooms, stairwells—rendered in dusty, waxy layers of oil pastel, crayon, and oil stick that recall over-handled film stills. Her figures, most often women, draw on tropes from Hollywood horror and exploitation cinema while also nodding to the Nabis, Edvard Munch, and Hans Bellmer, folding art-historical references into a distinctly contemporary, feminised image world.

‘Trap Paintings’ and early series

In early bodies of work such as the ‘Trap Paintings’ shown at A.D. Gallery in New York and in subsequent iterations at King’s Leap, Uckotter focused on claustrophobic interiors where stylised female figures appear frozen mid-action. These artworks already treated the picture plane as a kind of set, compressing narrative into single, ominous frames that feel like paused sequences from unseen films.

The exhibition Murder Time at Springsteen Gallery in Baltimore intensified this approach, presenting fragmented, smeared bodies in transitional spaces that suggest both domesticity and threat. Working almost exclusively on paper, Uckotter used the drag and smudge of oil pastel to give these scenes a grungy, degraded quality, echoing her interest in horror as a ‘ready-made’ language.

‘Moviestar’ and the cinema of painting

With Moviestar, unfolding across Matthew Brown in Los Angeles and a parallel exhibition at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Uckotter integrated filmmaking directly into her process. She wrote and directed a slasher-inspired film featuring a cast of hippies and yuppies in a meticulously constructed Reagan-era living room set, drawing partial inspiration from the Manson murders and American cult narratives.

Stills from this film became the basis for a cycle of paintings in dusky jewel tones, positioning the viewer as both witness and accomplice in scenes that slide between party, ritual, and violence. By shooting her own footage and then reworking it on paper, Uckotter assumes the role of artist-director, reclaiming agency over horror imagery while keeping narrative outcomes unresolved.​

Michelle Uckotter exhibitions

Michelle Uckotter has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at leading contemporary art galleries. Below is a selection of important presentations.

Select solo and two-person exhibitions

• Moviestar, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (with parallel exhibition at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles)
• Big Time Shopping is Here, Bernheim Gallery, Zurich
• Trap Paintings Vol. 3, King’s Leap, New Yorkk
• Dust Box, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles
• Stairwells Ephemera Etcetera, T293, Rome
• Murder Time, Springsteen Gallery, Baltimore

You can follow Michelle Uckotter on Ocula to keep up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring her work and to see a full list of exhibitions.

More reading

Michelle Uckotter’s practice has been discussed in international art publications including BOMB Magazine, Cultured, Interview Magazine, and Artillery. Readers can follow Michelle Uckotter on Ocula to see when new articles and interviews are linked to her artist page.

Michelle Uckotter FAQs

Ocula | 2026