Jill Mulleady

Jill Mulleady (b. 1980, Montevideo) is a Swiss-Uruguayan painter whose psychologically charged figurative work folds the history of painting into the anxieties of the present. Her canvases stage quiet interiors and landscapes suffused with foreboding — scenes that often feel like the calm before a storm, their solitary figures rendered in sickly, luminous flesh tones. Drawing openly on symbolist and early-modern sources, above all Edvard Munch, she lets different eras collide within a single image, producing spaces that feel at once specific and unplaceable.

Born in Montevideo and raised between Buenos Aires and Switzerland, Mulleady trained first in theater at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris before taking an MFA at Chelsea College of Arts in London. That theatrical formation remains central to her work: she frequently intervenes in the rooms where her paintings hang, staging them alongside readymades, sculptures, and architectural alterations so that the gallery becomes a kind of stage set, heightening the unease of looking. Across this practice, eroticism, boredom, and dread coexist, while recurring concerns with memory, transformation, and the weight of history lend her allegories of contemporary experience a charged, dreamlike instability.

Mulleady's paintings were included in Ralph Rugoff's central exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and she has held solo presentations at the Swiss Institute in New York, the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, among others. She took part in Made in L.A. 2020 at the Hammer Museum, and her work is held by the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. She lives and works between Los Angeles and Paris.