Jill Mulleady's 'Horror' at Sprüth Magers Wins ARTnews Award

Artist Jill Mulleady has won the ARTnews Award 2026 for Best Gallery Group Show for "Horror," curated at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles and on view November 21, 2025–February 14, 2026.

Mulleady, a figurative painter known for spectral figures and mystical phenomena, treated horror expansively. She didn't build the show around a single iconography or thesis. Instead, as ARTnews reports, she treated the genre as "a catch-all for everything we fear," letting a mood play out across more than half a century of art.

The checklist ranged wide. Paintings, sculptures, photographs and films sat side by side, stretching from a recording by Antonin Artaud from the days of Surrealism to recent works by Anne Imhof, Henry Taylor and Jordan Wolfson. Along the way, the exhibition addressed body horror, fear of the other, and abjection.

How did the show work on the wall?

Mulleady refused to adhere to a single style, but she made a number of shrewd pairings, according to ARTnews. The juxapositions carried the argument:

• Andra Ursuta's painting of a mysterious skeleton in a purplish void hung beside a Bruce Conner sculpture placing a skull in a shrine-like setting.
• A Pol Taburet painting of two brown figures in a bed sat next to a Precious Okoyomon sculpture composed of a racist doll.
• Mike Kelley's Odalisque, a hulking black mass on a divan, faced Sondra Perry's Flesh on Flesh (2021), a work based on a 3-D image of the artist's own facial skin.

Kelley, a sculptor whose work frequently invoked grotesque imagery, served as the exhibition's lodestar. Mulleady took direct inspiration from his 1993 exhibition "The Uncanny," aiming, as she wrote in an accompanying essay, to explore "the unsettling psychological tension created when the familiar is revealed to be disturbingly strange—a repressed domesticity surfacing in unsettling form."

Was the show political?

Not explicitly — and that was the point. Mulleady's interest in horror comes from the way it presents "a controlled confrontation with chaos," as she told Wallpaper. She described the catharsis of viewing such work as "a strategy to talk about real-life forces that are too hard to digest directly."

The award's practical upshot: Mulleady, better known as a painter than a curator, now has a validated curatorial signature — mood-driven, thesis-light, historically sweeping — that other galleries will likely want to borrow.

Who did 'Horror' beat?

Four nominees were shortlisted for the 2026 award:

• "How Beautiful This Living Thing Is," at Ortuzar, New York (April 22–May 30, 2026), curated by 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), curated by Martin Germann
• "What We Hold On To," at Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, Englewood, Colorado (September 5–December 12, 2025)

With "Horror" now closed and its competitors mostly still ahead on the calendar, the award functions less as a retrospective laurel than as a prompt — audiences can still catch several of the losing shows, and judge Mulleady's win against them firsthand.