PRESENTATION: Horror

The group exhibition “Horror” draws inspiration from the long lineage of horror in film and literature, while explicitly referencing Mike Kelley’s seminal 1993 exhibition “The Uncanny”. Kelley’s project explored the psychological discomfort of recognition and repression, but here the curator of the exhibition pushes further: horror here is not subtle unease but direct confrontation with fear and repulsion.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

The group exhibition “Horror” positions horror as a cultural seismograph, registering anxieties of our time—from systemic violence to existential dread. Freud’s notion of the uncanny—when the familiar becomes disturbingly strange—provides the intellectual foundation. Yet horror intensifies this mechanism, shifting from recognition to necessary confrontation. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, articulated in “Powers of Horror” resonates strongly: horror art reintroduces what society violently expels—corpse, waste, trauma—forcing viewers to face the fraught boundary between self and not-self.

Artists such as Paul Thek, Anne Imhof, Carol Rama, Tetsumi Kudo, Andra Ursuta, and Mire Lee embody this dissolution of the body, using viscera, fragmentation, and kinetic decay to bypass intellectual distance and provoke visceral dread. Horror becomes a reminder of mortality and the instability of identity. The exhibition situates horror as metaphor for institutional and political failure.

Kara Walker, Arthur Jafa, and Henry Taylor translate systemic racial trauma into potent figuration, while filmmakers like Jonathan Glazer and Diego Marcon expose collective anxieties through cinematic terror. Works by Jordan Wolfson and Bruce Conner channel destruction and fragmentation, offering allegorical pressure releases for societal collapse.

The monster, in this context, is never supernatural—it is always a metaphor for historical violence, surveillance, or political malaise. Horror thus becomes a strategy to process fears too massive to confront directly.

Perhaps the most radical claim of Horror is that beyond repulsion lies empathy. The grotesque, the ghostly, and the abject catalyze recognition of shared vulnerability. Karen Kilimnik, Asger Jorn, Rosemarie Trockel, Harmony Korine, and Ottessa Moshfegh employ dark humor and psychological charge to force self-reflection. The spectral presence of unresolved trauma surfaces in Cyprien Gaillard’s architectural hauntings, Pol Taburet’s figural paintings, Oliver Bak’s spectral canvases, and immersive soundscapes by Mati Diop & Fatima Al Qadiri. By shocking us into self-reflection, horror transcends chaos, becoming a tool for empathy and a profound meditation on the precariousness of human existence.

Mulleady’s “Horror” is not simply an exhibition of grotesque imagery—it is a curatorial manifesto. By reframing horror as both symptom and strategy, the show illuminates how art can confront trauma, expose systemic failures, and ultimately lead us from fear to empathy. In doing so, it situates horror as one of the most urgent aesthetic languages of our time.

Participating Artists: Dario Argento, Antonin Artaud, Oliver Bak, Bruce Conner, Mati Diop & Fatima Al Qadiri, Cyprien Gaillard, Jonathan Glazer, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa, Asger Jorn, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Harmony Korine, Tetsumi Kudo, Mire Lee, Diego Marcon, Tyler Mitchell, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jill Mulleady, Precious Okoyomon, Sondra Perry, Carol Rama, Cindy Sherman, Pol Taburet, Henry Taylor, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Andra Ursuta, Kara Walker and Jordan Wolfson

Photo: Arthur Jafa, Ex-Slave Gordon, 2017, Vacuum formed plastic, 144.8 × 111.8 × 22.9 cm | 57 × 44 × 9 inches, © Arthur Jafa, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery

Info: Curator: Jill Mulleady, Sprüth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA,USA, Duration: 21/11/2025-14/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://spruethmagers.com/