Fear

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale Napoli is pleased to announce Fear, a solo exhibition of new work by Jill Mulleady.

The work of Jill Mulleady is a deep and personal exploration of all languages of painting and the nature of images creating a visual universe characterized by eclecticism. Mulleady is concerned with the principle of mutability, and often appropriates the context where her work will be exhibited.

MANN has one of the world’s premier collections of art from Greco-Roman antiquity.

Mulleady has taken the concept of the Roman gladiator as the motif of her exhibition. According to legend, the surviving gladiator would be scraped down by a slave in the Roman baths after combat. The resulting gluey mixture (gloios) of sweat, oil, and dirt was highly valued and commercialized by the Roman elite as an aphrodisiac.

For her exhibition at MANN, Mulleady has chosen to create a scent as a mean to update the sen- sorial conditions of the museum.
This perfume, which shares the title of the exhibition, will be diffused throughout the Secret Cabi- net, where the sexually explicit frescoes, sculptures, and artefacts discovered in Pompeii are ex- hibited.

Mulleady has taken the concept of the Roman gladiator as the motif of her exhibition. According to legend, the surviving gladiator would be scraped down by a slave in the Roman baths after combat. The resulting gluey mixture (gloios) of sweat, oil, and dirt was highly valued and commercialized by the Roman elite as an aphrodisiac.

For her exhibition at MANN, Mulleady has chosen to create a scent as a mean to update the sen- sorial conditions of the museum.
This perfume, which shares the title of the exhibition, will be diffused throughout the Secret Cabi- net, where the sexually explicit frescoes, sculptures, and artefacts discovered in Pompeii are ex- hibited.

One of Mulleady’s paintings placed in the Secret Cabinet appropriates the tittle from a late essay by Pierre Klossowski, ”Origines cultuelles et mythiques d’ un certain comportement des dames romaines”.
Klossowski depicts the scabrous sexual motif as a unifying simulacrum for all kinds of ex- change—mythical, social, cultural—between gods and humans, the state and the people, each and his fantasies, the invisible & the visible.

Another painting depicts the steel bottle & logo designed by the artist for the perfume. The paint- ing could be seen as an advertising image evoking American Pop painting.

Also on display is a new series of paintings. Riot I, II & II are embedded with the primal scene of German Renaissance painting. Mulleady blends it with between the World Wars traditions such as New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). Riot III is also influenced by De Chirico’s hybrid eggheaded figures as if the characters had been affected physically by their metaphysical impli- cations.

Fear will be accompanied by a limited-edition artist’s book featuring writings by Raimundas Malašauskas & an encapsulated version of Fear’s perfume.

The perfume Fear was created on the occasion of the exhibition in collaboration with Creative Perfumers