Hamlet by Jill Mulleady

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Everyday scenes with figures, dreamscapes, and still lifes are among the central subjects in Jill Mulleady’s oeuvre. Despite their representational basis, her paintings, usually in large formats, have a peculiar air of abstraction. In many instances, the layering of colors in the pictorial space makes it seem that the figures could only exist as a compositional strategy. Mulleady’s artistic practice operates with explicit references to the history of painting. This was evident in her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 and at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which paid tribute to the oeuvre of Edvard Munch. Mulleady’s edition – a four-color lithograph on handmade paper – depicts Prince Hamlet, the tragic hero of Shakespeare’s eponymous play who, determined to avenge his father’s death, feigns madness to unmask a murderous scheme. The motif – Hamlet’s absent gaze and his hand supporting his head – echoes a painting from the artist’s current solo exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon and was produced specifically for TEXTE ZUR KUNST. Mulleady offers a striking portrait of Hamlet, showing that, centuries later, he is still a contemporary poster boy par excellence.

Jill Mulleady

Jill Mulleady was born in 1980 in Montevideo, Uruguay. She studied theater at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris, and received an MFA from Chelsea College of Arts, London. Mulleady’s paintings are representations of unsettling scenes and contorted bodies, oscillating between the beautiful and the horrifying, the quiet and the violent. Recognizable poets, writers, and artists are often featured in her work, among them the French playwright Antonin Artaud. Artaud, briefly a member of the surrealists and an important figure of twentieth-century theater, is best known for his writing associated with the Theater of Cruelty, an avant-garde form of theater that holistically assaults the audience’s senses. Artaud’s aim was to jar his public into a better understanding of their own repressed feelings, describing the experience as a “communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism.” Mulleady’s exhibitions are similarly infused with a consideration of the gallery as a proscenium; she often intervenes in the spaces in which her paintings are installed, staging them with readymades and architectural interventions. She has had solo exhibitions at Swiss Institute, New York (2019); Galerie Neu, Berlin (2018); Schloss, Oslo (2018); Kunsthalle Bern (2017); Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles (2017); and Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (2015). In 2019 Mulleady’s work was included in May You Live in Interesting Times at the 58th Venice Biennale.

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Enquiring about Hamlet | Jill Mulleady

More prints at Texte zur Kunst