Jill Mulleady Paints the Things that Keep Her Up at Night

Jill Mulleady is giving me a tour of her studio, in an Art Deco–era ­ building in Paris. It was originally the office of Léon Blum, three-time prime ­ minister of France, but it is now part of her home. It’s an especially hot afternoon, and the artist is smoking a cigarette. She resembles one of the serious, sly, almost Victorian characters who populate her work, and her prettiness is highlighted by the warm light filtering through the large windows. All around are imposing canvases that Mulleady has completed over the past couple years; the effect is reminiscent of that of the Barnes collection, in Philadelphia, where paintings are mounted cheek by jowl. Soon, however, the walls will be bare again. The paintings are being shipped to the Art Institute of Chicago, where Mulleady is opening a major show this fall, curated by Giampaolo Bianconi.

Mulleady is a figurative painter with a heavy Surrealist undercurrent. She depicts crowds, lovers, interiors, clowns, and bodies at rest in a style that borrows freely from familiar archetypes—then she lets something curdle. An eerie glow might poison an otherwise idyllic kiss; an inoffensive gathering may start to resemble, upon closer inspection, a vigil. “I paint the things that keep me up at night,” Mulleady says. “My paintings are the part of me that’s still awake, restless. They expose the cracks in the narrative we’ve been fed—the romance and the violence. These paintings are a love letter to the unresolved, to the characters that refuse to be pinned down.”

Mulleady, 45, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, but grew up in Buenos Aires. Her parents are both from Argentina; they settled in a small village on the Uruguayan coast during the dictatorship in their home country and returned to Buenos Aires when democracy did. “My grandfather was a Swiss professional skier and adventurer who went to the Andes to ski at a time before ski centers existed,” says Mulleady. “It was there he met my grandmother, at the top of a mountain. I’m really a mix of cultures and origins—I have Irish blood, Native American blood, French, Swiss.…”

Mulleady studied piano and theater as a teenager before committing to painting. “It took time for me to find my voice,” she says. “I spent many years looking for a way of expressing the thing that I wanted, that I felt was not there, until one day it just happened.” At 21, she left Buenos Aires, where she had worked jobs at the city’s film festival and international theater festival, for Paris, training at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and organizing a theater company. She chose the stage over art school on purpose. “I felt I was going to learn from exchange and from collaborations, rather than from books or a class on art history,” she says. Eventually, however, painting won. “Maybe because I’m sort of shy, I found in painting the possibility to open myself up in a broader way, without feeling immediately judged.” From Paris, she moved to London for an MFA at Chelsea College of Arts, and later to Los Angeles with her daughter’s father, a Belgian filmmaker.

She’s back in Paris now, but it was during her time in California that Mulleady gained notoriety as an artist. She lectured at UCLA for several years, and in her spare time learned to ice skate, hoping to feel more connected to the late abstract painter Joan Mitchell, who had been a competitive figure skater in her youth. A solo show at Kunsthalle Bern in 2017 led to another one at the Swiss Institute in New York. She was part of the central exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale, in 2019, and then was invited to the Hammer Museum’s 2020 Made in L.A. biennial, where she showed a monumental triptych of ­MacArthur Park painted from a studio window overlooking the area after the pandemic closed her downtown building. Still, she stresses that the increasing accolades are not the fuel that keeps her going. “I’ve never really relied on validation, and I still don’t,” she says. “One day they validate you, the next day they don’t. Imagine if Van Gogh had been looking for validation. For me, sometimes it’s a force when I’m not validated. I think, Okay, I’ll prove it.”

Mulleady’s compositions are thick with references to artists, actors, and writers she admires. One canvas in her studio depicts Sinéad O’Connor looking on in bemused annoyance; I spy another of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands embracing. A painting titled Venice or Las Vegas features young people loitering alongside a body of water in various stages of repose. Across the inky expanse, golden lanterns, lush trees, and twinkling palaces beckon; alas, there are no boats or bridges to get there. The languishing bodies in the foreground recall masterworks such as Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s At the Moulin Rouge, both of which have pride of place at the Art Institute of­ Chicago. Yet there is a certain melancholia in Mulleady’s piece that belongs to neither. One can’t really put a finger on what is wrong, which is precisely the point; Mulleady declines to solve her own pictures. “The figures and the content, at the end of the day, are just excuses to paint,” she says.

Another work, Malodor, a composition on velvet, is more directly discomforting. In the foreground lies a body—a corpse, perhaps. There are little skeletons dancing upon its limbs. A glowing green-blue halo emanates from the figure’s crumpled suit, and a crush of clowns stands above in passive vigil. James Ensor’s medical images of jeering doctors, with their hands full of guts, immediately rush to mind, as do the devilish riots of Hieronymus Bosch.

“The first time I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I was doing research,” Mulleady says. “I have a particular curiosity for collections that hold the conversation between America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. It’s this exchange I’m interested in, because this is how I learned to paint—by looking at paintings that were displaced and removed from their original context.” On that first visit, she was studying the evolution of the female nude throughout art history, preparing for 2024’s “You Me,” a two-person show with fellow artist Henry Taylor at the Schinkel Pavillon, in Berlin.

“Women had to fit into the canon of the time to get some relevance,” Mulleady says of her explorations at the Art Institute. “What came out of that was a different perspective.” She loves Berthe Morisot’s Woman at Her Toilette: “It was a moment when Manet and all these painters were opening the doors to modernism, and the female figure was the model, under the male gaze. I love how Morisot adopted the male canon and put a female gaze over a female figure. I think it really influenced Manet.” She loves, for the same reasons, Camille Claudel’s Young Roman, a bust of the sculptor’s teenage brother, its gesso painted to imitate Roman stone. The work inspired a trompe l’oeil marble sculpture of Mulleady’s own, also titled Young Roman, which was shown in Rome in 2024. This fall, the Art Institute highlights such connections: Mulleady’s survey opens the same month as “Mary ­ Cassatt: After Impressionism,” which marks the centennial of Cassatt’s death, and the first retrospective of the Colombian painter Beatriz González, who died earlier this year. “It’s a nice thing,” ­ Mulleady says, “to have all these different perspectives.”

Her own show stemmed from a conversation with Bianconi, who originally made his way to her newly set-up Parisian studio during the run-up to the nude show at the Schinkel Pavillon. Bianconi had joined the Art Institute of Chicago four years earlier and wanted to prioritize painting; the museum hadn’t mounted a major contemporary painting show in almost a decade. “Thinking about who could capture some sense of being alive today, I kept going back to Jill’s paintings,” Bianconi says. “These uneasy scenes where it’s sometimes difficult to tell if something has gone wrong. There’s a sense of threat and danger in them, and that’s the thing that has always really attracted me to Jill’s work: The interplay between subliminal and overt violence feels very of our time.”

The exhibition comprises about 20 works. There are paintings on stretched linen, works on velvet, and others for which Mulleady found and cut panes of glass to paint on. The velvet came about when she discovered a particularly compelling purple swath while shopping for fabric to make clothes for her daughter; the glass she found on the street, a story that sounds too cute to be true. “I promise you, ask the people around me,” she says. “I’m picking up trash all the time.” Her first glass painting, of a dead cat, was made on a found frame with glass; she is now having panes cut to the same dimensions so that the accident can become a small series.

The different mediums give her a sense of freedom. ­ Mulleady finds that velvet requires an expertly light touch, while glass is more about timing—the slippery surface demands a one-shot take. Like a multilingual poet, Mulleady picks the language that best conveys what she wants to express. She sometimes repeats a single image using different materials: “I like to try things, to see how they react in different mediums. You can look at the painting itself, in a formal way, when you’re not driven just by the image.”

Wordplay is also important for her. The title of the exhibition, “The Passenger,” can be interpreted in a variety of ways, all of which the artist considers valid. Does the passenger refer to the viewer and the ­ universal experience of going from painting to painting at a museum? Or to the paintings themselves, which traveled from Paris to Chicago and will surely continue to new homes? Or is it an allusion to Mulleady herself, who, in addition to having lived all over the world, regularly shuttles between different centuries for inspiration?

Mulleady moves over to a larger composition, a triptych that swallows a whole wall and is the show’s namesake work. It’s a dark crowd scene that recalls the rallies and protests that feel so endemic to this time. I ask her where the crowd is headed, but she won’t offer any clues. “The passenger is someone who has not yet arrived,” she says. “When I paint, it’s because I feel I’m going somewhere, not because I want to arrive anywhere.”

Hair by Yusuke Taniguchi at B. Agency; Makeup by Porsche Poon for Byredo at Total World; Photo Assistant: Christian Varas; Fashion assistant: Michele Vassanelli.