Horror at Sprüth Magers

Jill Mulleady, Kryptonite (2025). Oil on linen, 63 × 85 inches. © Jill Mulleady. Image courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Sprüth Magers.

In 1993, Mike Kelley curated The Uncanny, a group exhibition that was mainly preoccupied with anxieties surrounding familiar, humanlike figures. Originally presented at Sonsbeek 93 in the Netherlands, it was populated by artworks made up of dolls, mannequins, statues, and disembodied limbs and heads, as well as gruesome photographs depicting them. Recently, a group exhibition at Sprüth Magers took the psychological discomfort of The Uncanny as its starting point—though its title, Horror, signaled its aim of presenting a more “explicit shock of horror,” one befitting our traumatic age of “societal collapse.”¹ Curated by artist Jill Mulleady and installed across several rooms on two floors was the work of about 30 artists and filmmakers, some hidden behind dark partitions or curtains or displayed in a living room-like gallery upstairs, complete with a rug, TV, and duo of sofas. Most noticeably, many video and audio works imbued the space with a sort of supernatural quality, their echoing sounds and flickering lights playing off each other. If The Uncanny’s greatest fears were rooted in physical encounters with the human body, the more diffuse subjects in Horror, ranging from ghostly domestic scenes to gun violence, were harder to pin down, but perhaps this technologically-mediated audio-visual jumble characterizes our multimedia age. While many works seemed too restrained or self-conscious to be properly horrific on their own, they were chaotically amplified when taken together, providing a feeling of desensitization familiar to anyone who finds themselves overwhelmed by a daily flood of disturbing images and clips.

The exhibition’s haunted- house atmosphere was tense. Its scares ranged from eerie abstract paintings to psychologically charged sculptures to darkly humorous videos, many of which employ the amateur aesthetic of found-footage scary movies. Mulleady included six pieces by Kelley himself, among them video works that display his typical engagements with pop culture, like the self-explanatory Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (1999), where the self-serious hero monologues the author’s existential angst in a darkened void. This video was in turn referenced elsewhere in one of Mulleady’s own hallucinogenically colored paintings, Kryptonite (2025), depicting a young man reading a copy of The Bell Jar while a disembodied hand holds an eerily glowing rock; in a painting-within- the-painting, meanwhile, sinister figures loom on the wall beside him. This recursive, self-referential playfulness typifies the exhibition, which engaged more readily with film and media tropes than directly with any real-world horrors.

Like in The Uncanny, many works employed human bodies or their constituent parts, though often in a much more understated way. Stretched across two empty white walls was Paul Thek’s Meat Cable (1969), an off-kilter steel wire with four waxy, flesh-colored nodes across its length. Its vague minimalism produces perhaps a stronger psychological reaction than something more explicit would, forcing the viewer to work out if they’re looking at the result of some sort of distressing scientific experiment or biological process, neither possibility a pleasant one. Body horror is given a biopolitical dimension in Rosemarie Trockel’s video Manus Spleen 3 (2001), a home movie that shakily captures a birthday party at which a woman’s pregnant belly suddenly pops and deflates as guests laugh and raise their glasses. The jovial mood’s discordance with the disappearance of Rosemarie’s baby gestures toward very real anxieties related to women’s lack of bodily autonomy, even if its dry humor is too detached to reach any immediate levels of horror.

There were also specters of violence hiding in unlikely places. Diego Marcon’s TINPO (2006), for example, choppily edits camcorder footage of a young boy pointing a toy handgun at himself and his relatives, turning a family gathering into a jittery, stuttering piece of analog horror. In Curb Dance (2011), Harmony Korine wears a bright pink dress and holds a clown doll as he tap dances across sidewalks and parking lots, his voiceover declaring “curb dancing is the best” before abruptly transitioning into a story about two teenage brothers who killed people they found in remote cabins. Both give you a dreadful feeling that casual murderous violence underpins the most mundane, even cheerful, moments of American life, although the nostalgic VHS aesthetic of these and other video works can too easily make them feel like a relic of the past. Meanwhile, the inclusion of pieces of media like Dario Argento’s Technicolor thriller Suspiria (1977), also playing on a CRT monitor that was sitting on the floor of the exhibition, seemed to relegate them to the realm of fiction.

We are living in frightening times, with so many incomprehensible horrors playing out at once; what scared us just a few decades ago, at least as it was presented in The Uncanny, seems almost benign in retrospect. Perhaps it was precisely Horror’s conflation of fact, fantasy, and scary movie tropes— channeled through an inescapable interplay of screens, projections, and recordings—that appropriately embodied the anxieties of an overwhelming age in which scenes of gruesome brutality are presented and consumed alongside movie clips, ads, and lifestyle content. Yet the exhibition’s most haunting gesture might also be its quietest. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s Untitled (2025), two unremarkable couches faced one another at the center of a gallery crowded with paintings and flickering images. Only on closer inspection did you notice that each is caked with dirt and debris, and the accompanying plaque that recounts how one was previously abandoned outdoors in Pasadena, the other kept inside, and how both survived the 2025 Eaton Canyon fires, chemical damage, and other environmental catastrophes before being brought to the gallery. “Both sofas should be destroyed,” it concludes, a genuine sentiment that felt out of place among the deliberate irony that permeated so much of Horror. Moshfegh’s installation was singularly unsettling among the exhibition’s more self-conscious engagements with cinema and theatrics, the implied realities of the havoc wreaked on its previous unknown owners briefly providing a visceral connection to some of the immediate, real-world fears of our place and time.

Horror (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artists and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

About the author

Alexander Schneider is a writer and editor currently based in Los Angeles. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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