Jill Mulleady “Fight-or-Flight”

Swiss Institute Contemporary Art

This event has ended.

Swiss Institute presents Fight-or-Flight, the first US institutional solo exhibition by Swiss-Uruguayan artist Jill Mulleady. Drawing on the history of SI’s location at 38 St Marks Pl, originally built in 1954 as a bank, Mulleady has created a group of new, interrelated works that weave a speculative allegorical fiction. Centered on a monumental painting, Fight-or-Flight roots out fantasies, motivations and fears hidden in the building’s walls in order to depict a mythological landscape of polarization and crisis. The physiological stress responses produced by such an environment are enacted by a number of animals and characters in Mulleady’s paintings and woodcuts, who either adopt extreme or violent survival methods, or retreat into isolation.

The exhibition’s central painting, A Fantasy of Transcendence and a Preoccupation with Downfall and Ruin (2019) features a giant figure in repose on a small island: a Colossus continuous with his environment. Water runs between his clawlike feet to create waterfalls that spill over the cliffs, while his long hair tumbles towards the mouth of a cave. Collapsing a number of time periods onto the canvas, the painting draws on 16th century sources preoccupied by fantasies of physical magnitude and lands of rest and relaxation free from labor, as seen in Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s The Land of Cockaigne (1567) or in scenes of François Rabelais’s epic satire, The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532–1564). With its stylized landscape and lysergic sky, the painting pushes those narratives through a more recent painterly history of Post-impressionism and Expressionism, towards the posthuman futures suggested by a tablet with three-dimensional graphics and the figure’s unnervingly glowing eyes. Fenced in, stupefied, birdwatching, the giant is an emblem of the power, control and privacy afforded by the hoarding of resources.

A number of woodcuts and other painted elements introduce another set of characters: aggressive rats as survivalists who live in the hidden remains of destroyed infrastructures, and who embody a desperate and diminished fight for life. In a series of woodcuts on Swiss Institute’s second floor, four rats fly over an urban landscape riding horses, vermin as contemporary harbingers of apocalypse. Ancient mythologies are reanimated in the exhibition with an enduring, twisted force. And yet, opposed and extreme, the characters in Mulleady’s feverish works also point to futures in which beings are pushed into marginal spaces, suggesting an ominous threat at civilization’s center.

Jill Mulleady (b. Montevideo, Uruguay, 1980) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include: Schloss, Oslo (2018); Kunsthalle Bern (2017); and Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli (2015). Recent group shows include: May You Live in Interesting Times, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019); and Digital Gothic, Centre d’art contemporain – la synagogue de Delme (2019). Her work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Jill Mulleady: Fight-or-Flight is made possible in part with generous support from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation. SI would like to thank the Jill Mulleady Exhibition Circle: Murray Abramson, Freedman Fitzpatrick Los Angeles / Paris, Galerie Neu, and Catherine Pettigas.