Jill Mulleady

In the paintings and woodcuts of Swiss artist Jill Mulleady (born 1980), characters enact the physiological stress reactions of “fight or flight”: either adopting extreme or violent survival methods, or retreating into isolation. Mulleady's work roots out fantasies, motivations and fears in order to depict a landscape of polarization and crisis. Ancient mythologies and recent histories are reanimated in her feverish work with an enduring, twisted force. And yet, opposed and extreme, the figures and scenes featured also point to futures in which beings are pushed into marginal spaces, suggesting an ominous threat at civilization’s center. Fight or Flight is the first major monograph on Jill Mulleady, surveying her artistic output over the last 10 years. It features newly commissioned essays by curator Laura McLean-Ferris, author Ottessa Moshfegh and anthropologist Michael Taussig, and a conversation between Mosfegh and Mulleady.

Los Angeles–based Swiss Uruguayan artist Jill Mulleady (born 1980) creates critically acclaimed paintings whose abiding mood suggests pent-up tensions between isolate figures in incongruously lush, sumptuously chromatic landscapes and domestic interiors. Recalling early modernist painters of intensely loaded psychic atmosphere such as Félix Vallotton and Edvard Munch, and perhaps informed by her training in theater, Mulleady’s backdrops, rendered in her characteristic tones of gray, crimson and absinthe green, are generally invented, or may sometimes draw on the contours of her immediate environment, such as the parks of Los Angeles; her figures, meanwhile, seem lost in contemplation, alienated, even despairing at times. This beautifully produced volume presents the artist’s paintings from 2015 to 2021, and features a special cover design by Mulleady.