TORONTO.- Channeling the intense drama, scale, and emotion of 17th-century Baroque art, acclaimed American painter Jesse Mockrin presents new and recent works reimagining female figures from myth and the Bible. Extracting details and scenes from historical paintings in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Collection of European Art, Mockrin’s large-scale multipaneled paintings zoom and crop heroines, propelling their stories out of the past and into the present tense. Shown in dialogue with select works from the AGO’s collection, Jesse Mockrin: Echo opened at the AGO on Sept. 11, 2025.

Widely celebrated for her 2020 portrait of Billie Eilish rendered in the style of a Caravaggio painting, Mockrin’s interest in historical oil painting transcends subject matter and is reflected in her meticulous adoption of late 17th-century painting technique, with its highly realistic attention to detail, invisible brushstrokes, and thin glaze finishes. But while Baroque painters sought to instruct and inspire with heavily varnished, harmonious compositions, Mockrin’s approach to her subject is intensely contemporary; her figures are truncated and pushed over the edges of the frame, faces often obscured or composited. Backdropped against empty space, absent any signifying detail or decoration, her once historical figures and details exist only in the here and now.

On view in the Philip B. Lind Gallery on Level 1, the exhibition is curated by the AGO’s Associate Curator of European Art, Adam Harris Levine. Presenting paintings and drawings in dialogue with works from the AGO’s Collection of European Art, Echo mimics Mockrin’s own immersion into the AGO Collection. An immersion that began first from afar, in 2017, when images of the AGO’s Massacre of the Innocents (c.1610) propelled her to create In mid-stream, a tightly hung diptych that reimagines the violence of Rubens’ original as a cataclysmic cliff over which women were pushed, into nothingness.

“While exploring the AGO’s incredible collection of 17th-century objects, I was struck by the violence they contained, particularly towards women. Obscured by historical trappings and artistic skill, there is a recurring pattern in the ways that Judith, Bathsheba, Daphne, Eve, the Sabine women, and the unnamed women of the Judgment of Solomon are portrayed as marginalized in their own stories,” says Mockrin. “By focusing in on details from these works, by liberating these figures from their original context, my hope is that I can empower the viewer to see these figures with empathy, and to see historical art anew.”

In Echo, Mockrin’s subject is the fate of the female figure, both mythical and Biblical, from Eve to Bathsheba and Daphne. Seen collectively, the paintings on view highlight an ongoing battle for bodily autonomy. Throughout, in a nod to feminine resilience, Mockrin incorporates symbols of feminine knowledge and sources of power – medicinal plants, solidarity, and cunning.

“Historical paintings contain great beauty and tell us much about how we live today, but mask with their grandeur great violence. Mockrin is drawn to these stories, and draws our attention to them, because they offer insight into how and why society still expects women to be treated with cruelty and seems to delight in their suffering,” says Associate Curator Adam Harris Levine. “Collaborating with Mockrin, an artist whose sincere admiration for historical painting is evident in her work, has been exceptional, and I welcome visitors to come and see our Collection through her eyes.”

Greeting visitors to the exhibition is Only Sound Remains (2025), a large-scale oil on canvas depicting Echo, a nymph from Greek mythology forced to forever repeat that which has come before.

In Forbidden Fruit (2025), Mockrin showcases the torso of an unrepentant Eve. In her hand, pennyroyal leaves replace the usual fig leaf. Pennyroyal appeared frequently in medieval texts on women’s medicine; for centuries, women used the flowering plant as an abortifacient. Mockrin draws a connection between Eve’s original sin—the desire for knowledge—and with women’s ancient, collective, and furtive understanding of their own bodies.

Mockrin’s luminous five-panel painting The Descent (2024) makes the miniature ivory figures crowded in Ignaz Elhafen’s Tankard, Abduction of the Sabine Women (1697) life-size. Stretching nearly 8 meters long and done in the signature grey tones of grisaille painting, Mockrin reveals the horrific truth of Elhafen’s delicate miniature embellishment by giving expression and presence to the nameless women of Sabine, as they struggle to avoid abduction and rape by Roman soldiers.

Inspired by the AGO’s own Bathsheba Bathing c.1663 by Luca Giordano, Mockrin’s 2025 painting Witness is a form of reclamation, elevating as it does Giordano’s Black female servant figure from decorative addition to lead character. A character whose victimhood is greater than Bathsheba’s own and yet underrecognized, Mockrin invites audiences with empathy and curiosity to consider this woman’s own fate.

Ahead of the exhibition opening, Mockrin’s 2025 painting Fracture, recently acquired by the AGO, goes on view in E. R. Wood Gallery adjacent to its inspiration, Nicolas Tournier’s The Judgement of Solomon (1625).

Launching in tandem with the exhibition comes Jesse Mockrin: Echo, the artist’s first museum publication. Elegantly illustrated, this 116-page clothbound catalogue is published by the AGO with Del Monico Books • D.A.P. Featuring an interview with the artist in conversation with Adam Harris Levine, as well as texts by Carmen Maria Machado and Jacoba Urist, Echo arrives this September at shopAGO for $40 CAD.