From still lifes of withering flowers to nudes descending staircases (Marcel ­Duchamp’s original comes to mind, as well as reinterpretations by Gerhard Richter, Jana Euler, or Henry Taylor), Jill Mulleady’s work has restaged and updated many motifs from the history of painting. For her second TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition, the artist has turned to the topos of the reading woman, a theme that has fascinated many male painters since the Renaissance. The woman or girl immersed in the intimate, introspective act of reading was considered an enigma, entering unknown worlds and escaping male dominance. As works of Mary Stevenson Cassatt or Berthe Morisot show, the subject matter also attracted the female gaze, and it continues to fascinate. Lingering on a staircase and delving into Rainer Maria Rilke’s “­Sonnets of Orpheus,” Mulleady’s eponymous sitter, Eurydice, suggests a new interpretation: in Greek ­mythology, Eurydice was forced to return to the realm of the dead because Orpheus turned around to look at her, defying Hades’s instructions not to. Transposed to the now, Orpheus is not even physically present, and Eurydice lives in an ­atomized world of social disconnection. Mulleady’s reader, however, stays focused and fully ­submerged in her book, engaging in human relations only in a mediated format. She is the ­painter’s daughter, Olympia; thus, this work is also a labor of love – and quite ­visibly so: even Olympia’s nails have been carefully painted. The edition has been ­lithographically produced in minute detail, and its loosely three-layered colors and lively gestural marks give its history-laden composition a personal touch of ­unexpected lightness.