ewsba.se
“Horror”At Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles (November 21, 2025–February 14, 2026)Curator: Jill Mulleady
With her group show “Horror” at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, artist Jill Mulleady took an expansive view of its titular genre, viewing horror not from the perspective of a single iconography or set of concerns but rather as a catch-all for everything we fear. Mulleady, a figurative painter whose work invokes spectral figures and mystical phenomena, did not offer a thesis necessarily with this show. Instead, she evoked a vibe that played out across more than half a century of art. Bringing together paintings, sculptures, photographs, and films, Mulleady reached as far back as the days of Surrealism by featuring a recording by Antonin Artaud and extended through the present with recent works by Anne Imhof, Henry Taylor, and Jordan Wolfson. Along the way, the exhibition addressed body horror, fear of the other, abjection, and other resonant topics.
“Horror” cast its net widely, refusing to adhere to a specific style while also making a number of shrewd curatorial decisions. An Andra Ursuta painting showing a mysterious skeleton in a purplish void could be found next to a Bruce Conner sculpture that placed a skull in a shrine-like setting. A Pol Taburet painting of two brown figures in a bed was placed beside a Precious Okoyomon sculpture composed of a racist doll. Mike Kelley’s Odalisque, a hulking black mass on a divan, was set before Sondra Perry’s Flesh on Flesh (2021), a work based on a 3-D image of the artist’s own facial skin.
The exhibition’s lodestar was Kelley, a sculptor whose work frequently invoked grotesque imagery. Taking inspiration from Kelley’s 1993 exhibition “The Uncanny,” the show sought to explore “the unsettling psychological tension created when the familiar is revealed to be disturbingly strange—a repressed domesticity surfacing in unsettling form,” as she wrote in an accompanying essay. Mulleady’s show was not explicitly political, but that, in a way, was its point. Her interest in horror comes from the way it presents a “a controlled confrontation with chaos,” as she told Wallpaper. There’s a sense of catharsis that comes through viewing work of this kind, which she described as “a strategy to talk about real-life forces that are too hard to digest directly.”
“How Beautiful This Living Thing Is”at Ortuzar, New York (April 22–May 30, 2026)Curator: Andrew Durbin
“Snake, Turtle, Alligator”at David Peter Francis, New York, co-organized with Interrobang (January 10–February 7, 2026)
“Statics of an Egg”at David Zwirner, New York (May 8–June 27, 2026)Curator: Martin Germann
“What We Hold On To”at Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, Englewood, Colorado (September 5—December 12, 2025)