Jill Mulleady

Jill Mulleady was born in 1980 in Montevideo, Uruguay, and was raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She first trained in theatre, studying with the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris from 2002 to 2003, associated with the teaching lineage of Ariane Mnouchkine, before turning to painting. She moved to London to study at Chelsea College of Arts, receiving an MFA in 2009. She relocated to Los Angeles around 2013, and current biographies describe her as living and working between Los Angeles and Paris; she has also held a lecturer position in the painting department at UCLA since 2018.

Mulleady's paintings are figurative and psychologically charged, drawing on architecture, art history, and states of fear and unease; the titles of her exhibitions, including Angst vor Angst, Fight-or-Flight, Fear, and Blood Fog, point to a sustained interest in anxiety and dread as subject matter. Her international profile rose through a run of solo shows at institutions such as Kunsthalle Bern (2017), the Swiss Institute in New York (2019), and Le Consortium in Dijon (2021), and she was selected for the central exhibition of the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff, in 2019. In 2020 she produced a public art installation, We Wither Time into a Coil of Fright, for the Whitney Museum of American Art. As of mid-2026, all available sources describe her as living and actively exhibiting, with a 2025 solo presentation, Copistes, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

Mulleady has been the subject of critical writing in outlets including Flash Art, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Cura, and Mousse, but the dossier available for this profile could not confirm exact, quotable wording from any named critic, so no direct quotations are reproduced here. In institutional terms, her selection by Ralph Rugoff for the central exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale, alongside her Whitney Museum installation and holdings at the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, mark her as an artist whose reputation has been built substantially through museum and biennial recognition rather than through auction results. Recurring themes in her exhibition titles and gallery descriptions, fear, anxiety, architecture, and history, suggest a critical conversation centered on psychologically loaded figuration rather than pure formal abstraction.

Mulleady's auction record is A Thousand Natural Shocks (2017), which sold for USD 120,650 at Phillips in New York on 15 May 2024. Her other tracked results include Schindler House (2017), which sold for USD 82,500 at Phillips New York on 16 May 2023 and, when it reappeared at Phillips New York on 21 November 2025, brought a lower USD 64,500, a gap that illustrates how few of her works have come to auction and how much any single result can move with the specific painting and the moment of sale rather than tracing a broad market trend. The auction record available does not yet support a reliable trend read, and collectors should treat her secondary market as thin and early-stage.

Mulleady's market is defined less by auction depth than by institutional support: museum holdings at the Hammer, the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney all sit ahead of a secondary market that has produced only a small number of tracked public sales. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and gallery-based verification through Gladstone Gallery or Fitzpatrick Gallery carry more weight than they would for an artist with a longer sale history. Given the gap between her confirmed auction high and the lower, declining prices for a repeat-sale work such as Schindler House, collectors should treat any single price as an early data point rather than an established trend.