The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the world’s largest, most comprehensive and most loved art museums. Home to the greatest Impressionist collection outside of Paris, the Art Institute also holds work by many of history’s greatest artists; highlights include Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River, René Magritte’s Time Transfixed, Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath, and many others.
The Art Institute of Chicago also offers visitors a unique collection of works by celebrated artists from Chicago, such as Harry Callahan, H.C. Westermann, Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Leon Golub, Julia Fish, and others.
Highlighted Chicago architects include: Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jeanne Gang, Dirk Lohan, Bertrand Goldberg, among others.
Contemporary masterpieces are on view in the spectacular Modern Wing.
Travel the globe through galleries devoted to the art of ancient Greece, Japan, Africa, and the Americas. View the much loved miniature Thorne Rooms, and more.
Advance ticket purchase is required for the public. Members do not need tickets.
Image: Francis Picabia, Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), 1913. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Armand Bartos. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
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Sep 19, 2026–Jan 18, 2027
Jill Mulleady paints by breathing new life into unseen histories.
Drawing from art-historical, cinematic, and literary sources, her memorable images can haunt the viewer long after encountering them. This exhibition—Mulleady’s first solo show at a major museum—brings together approximately 20 paintings by the artist.
Mulleady uses various methods including staining, and at times incorporating materials such as copper, to achieve fragile, luminous surfaces that feel impossibly thin yet visually deep, holding tension between flatness and depth. Not limited to canvas or linen, she employs a range of supports, including glass and velvet. The resultant works balance different degrees of transparency and opacity and can be looked at and, sometimes, seen through.
Mulleady’s paintings often depict scenes that are enigmatic and dangerous, showing figures at risk or under threat—from appetite, predation, or compulsion. While these ambiguous scenes may imply narratives, they likewise refuse tidy resolutions. Her imagery draws actively on painting lineages—allegory and the Baroque, Symbolist unease, the grotesque—recasting genres and canonical images for the present. In contrast to the purity and rationality of 20th-century modernism, Mulleady prioritizes a tradition in which chaos, instinct, and history drive art making.
As Mulleady has said, she works with existing languages in order to invent a new one, and her staged tableaux are particularly resonant within the Art Institute galleries, as they rhyme with many works in the collection that have informed the artist.
Jill Mulleady: The Passenger is curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Image:
Maldoror, 2025
Jill Mulleady
Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur
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