Through light, crop and intentional negative space, Mockrin challenges the stories surrounding women painted into obedience.

The gallery hums with the sound of breath held between centuries. Light pools against oil and linen, bending around bodies that seem to remember something the rest of us have forgotten. Jesse Mockrin’s paintings live in that hush — between devotion and defiance. Her brushwork recalls the chiaroscuro of the Baroque old-world, yet her vision belongs to the present. 

Mockrin’s breakout moment came in 2020 when her Baroque-style portrait of Billie Eilish captured international notoriety, a work that merged pop iconography with Caravaggio-inspired drama. The image went viral for its eerie serenity – a siren saint reborn in a hoodie. It marked the arrival of Mockrin’s unmistakable style: classical technique charged with contemporary subversion.

Now, five years later, Mockrin debuts Echo, an exhibit including 25 paintings and eight drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario, on now until spring 2026. Echo feels both contemporary and timeless — a meditation on how myths around gendered violence persist beneath history’s gilded frame, until the story feels palpitably diluted, sneaking into our subconscious without setting off any alarms. Every canvas asks what moral survives when a story is told often enough to seem true. The work was three years in the making, realized in close collaboration with the AGO’s European Art department, its foundation drawn from Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the gallery’s own collection. “To study the past helps us to better understand the present,” Associate Curator Adam Harris Levine explains. “Historical paintings contain great beauty and tell us much about how we live today, but mask with their grandeur great violence. Mockrin draws our attention to these stories, because they offer insight into how and why society still expects women to be treated with cruelty.”