Bod Mellor
‘Sybil’
10 July to 4 September 2026

Opening: Thursday 9 July 6pm to 8pm

Bod Mellor’s forthcoming exhibition at Moon Grove stages a complex choreography of doubling, echo and projection, drawing on the artist’s longstanding engagement with psycho-dramatic fiction. At its centre is a series of newly commissioned, slightly larger-than-life, three-quarter-length portraits of television therapists, figures both imposing and strangely performative. The exhibition’s title refers to Mellor’s fascination with the character Sybil Dorsett, portrayed in the 1976 and 2007 television movies Sybil, an art student and teacher with sixteen distinct personalities undergoing therapy with Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur. The narrative follows her life in New York City as she juggles her university art classes and her teaching job while navigating severe blackouts.

This citation, which describes a fragmented persona splitting and multiplying under scrutiny, opens onto a series of paintings featuring fictional screen analysts, including Dr Jennifer Melfi from The Sopranos, whose relationship with mafia boss Tony Soprano becomes increasingly compromised; Briony Ariston, the forensic child clinician in the Netflix mini-series Adolescence; Dr Frasier Crane from Frasier, a Harvard-educated, Freudian who transitions from traditional private practice into a highly successful, albeit unorthodox, radio talk show host; and Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, the chain-smoking, alcoholic, anti-hero, forensic psychologist from the Manchester-based British crime drama Cracker.

Rather than functioning as straightforward portraits, these works invite audiences to consider how prior knowledge of these television programmes shapes and complicates their interpretation of the images. Essentially, if viewers identify with each character, whilst simultaneously assuming the position of patient, the project brings together its painted figures in a dense therapeutic assemblage. Conceived as a ‘grand conference’ of fictitious psychotherapists, where each analyst becomes the focus of analysis, this recursive staging resonates with the conditions of the profession – therapists undergoing therapy – as well as with the domestic setting of Moon Grove, which mirrors the intimate, home-based environments in which many psychotherapists practice.

Mellor’s new works consequently treat psychotherapy as both subject and method, collapsing self-expression into a kind of self-conscious parody, where analysis loops back on itself. Like an echo of earlier projects – such as Mellor’s invocation of Genet’s The Maids – the body of work explores mirroring and role-play, hinting at institutional and psychological enclosures, even flirtations with the idea of the ‘prison’ as both literal and psychic structure.

As part of Moon Grove’s programme, this presentation extends a dialogue with Stephen Sutcliffe’s ‘Psychopomp’, previously exhibited at the gallery between February and May 2026, which connected Manchester’s literary histories to psychoanalytic undercurrents through the Anthony Burgess archive. Mellor deepens that lineage, while subtly drawing the gallery's co-director Benjamin Cook’s own therapeutic practice into its field of critique. The resulting exhibition is both theatrical and introspective: a site where authority is inflated and undermined, and where spectators, like patients, confront their own position within a carefully staged psychological drama.

Bod Mellor was born in 1970 at St Mary's Hospital, Manchester Royal Infirmary, and studied at Manchester Polytechnic, Central Saint Martins, and the Royal College of Art in London. Mellor is represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. This exhibition marks the artist's first solo presentation in their hometown.