Jill Mulleady paints by breathing new life into unseen histories.

Drawing from art-historical, cinematic, and literary sources, her memorable images can haunt the viewer long after encountering them. This exhibition—Mulleady’s first solo show at a major museum—brings together approximately 20 paintings by the artist.

Mulleady uses various methods including staining, and at times incorporating materials such as copper, to achieve fragile, luminous surfaces that feel impossibly thin yet visually deep, holding tension between flatness and depth. Not limited to canvas or linen, she employs a range of supports, including glass and velvet. The resultant works balance different degrees of transparency and opacity and can be looked at and, sometimes, seen through.

Mulleady’s paintings often depict scenes that are enigmatic and dangerous, showing figures at risk or under threat—from appetite, predation, or compulsion. While these ambiguous scenes may imply narratives, they likewise refuse tidy resolutions. Her imagery draws actively on painting lineages—allegory and the Baroque, Symbolist unease, the grotesque—recasting genres and canonical images for the present. In contrast to the purity and rationality of 20th-century modernism, Mulleady prioritizes a tradition in which chaos, instinct, and history drive art making.

As Mulleady has said, she works with existing languages in order to invent a new one, and her staged tableaux are particularly resonant within the Art Institute galleries, as they rhyme with many works in the collection that have informed the artist.