Opacity and revelation | Julie Mehretu

A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory by Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu reverberates with the complexities of the present and the recent past.

The typical arc of a mid-career retrospective exhibition is that of an artist arriving at a fully formed artistic style. But this major exhibition is not a retrospective and is less about arrivals than about new possibilities and openings. The show attempts something distinct and more interesting than a retrospective as it presents works by Julie Mehretu from the mid-nineties to the contemporary moment. These include fifty works on paper spanning the full breadth of the artist’s practice, alongside thirty-six paintings whose selection are strongly weighted toward the present, with only seven produced prior to the year 2020. This highlights continuity, change, and an upswell of momentum in an oeuvre grappling with the present through an evolving language of abstraction. This is a present which, in the same month that this exhibition opened, saw the re-election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, heralding an era in which socially and politically engaged art is both more in jeopardy, and more necessary, than ever.

In the first room we encounter an intently layered, abstract painting of gestural marks combined with screen printing and spray-painting in ink and acrylic. Alongside are the delicate lines and impressionistic smudges of one of the Mind Breath Drawings, 2010, and a technically involved, nineteen-colour aquatint etching. This sets the scene for a body of work that is intuitive as well as precise, and notably exploratory in its approach to different media.

In an adjoining room is the painting Black Monolith, for Okwui Enwezor (Charlottesville), 2017-20, the title honouring the late Nigerian curator whose radical postcolonial practice prefigures today’s conversations around decolonisation. The surface of Black Monolith is host to striking, stencilled colours, and equally striking black lines and smudges, the latter of which can be read as shadow. The different grounds of the paintings—fore, middle, and back—seem to move, even struggle against each other. Entirely hidden within this work are the blurred photographic images of a white supremacist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia. We encounter another standout painting later in the exhibition, Hineni II (E. 3:4), 2019-20, a work of charred reds, blacks, oranges, and startling yellows, in which photographic imagery, blurred and manipulated to the point of abstraction, this time of Californian wildfires, forms the compositional base. This referencing and layering of photography within abstract paintings is just one of the ways in which they are insistently, in the words of the artist, “of this world.”

The drawings, although quieter, are important to this show, and unlike the paintings date to earlier in the artist’s career. They sensitise us to the artist’s differing qualities of line and to the representational imagery that is also vital to her process. There is an almost analytical precision to some of the drawings created in the nineties, while the titles Migration Direction Map, 1996, and Conflict Location Index, 1997, hint strongly at the geopolitical concerns which inform Mehretu’s work and her lived childhood experience fleeing the war and revolution in Ethiopia to come to the US. These works bear witness to an impulse to map and make marks and to transform representational imagery into abstracted forms and composition.

The visual language in the etchings with aquatint is also absorbing, evoking worlds as various as ancient cave paintings and data mining. Stages of Uprising, 2024, a four-panel etching with aquatint produced at Gemini G.E.L Studios in LA, involving up to six layers of forty-six colours inked on multiple plates, break new technical ground for printmaking. If one looks closely at all these works, and their titles, one is primed for the ways in which they are both abstract and worldly, so that when we come to the final rooms and the departure represented by the TRANSpaintings of 2023-24, we are cognisant of the many currents underlying Mehretu’s abstraction.

There are a number of ways in which to view Mehretu’s works, which as the artist reflects in the exhibition catalogue, embrace complexity and contradiction. The two ways this viewer oscillated between were as a wholly visual and physical experience, and as constellations of references to social and political events. Some works were more rewarding with the first perspective and others the second, but what was most engrossing was to shift between these points of view, undergoing the seductive visual pull of a painting and the incisiveness of its intersection with reality.

The TRANSpaintings are not hung against a wall as Mehretu’s other works are, including paintings as recent as Sumo, 2024. They are free-standing, held in metal supports created by Nairy Baghramian, an Iranian born, Berlin-based artist and collaborator with Mehretu. They have a sculptural character of their own with two off-centre legs connecting the painting to the floor and a third arm locating it in relation to the ceiling, creating a seemingly hybrid work. Just as striking about the paintings is their surface and medium. Monofilament polyester mesh replaces canvas as the base, on which ink and acrylic are then applied. The works become curiously more material and transparent at the same time, with light infiltrating the paint layers and passing through to the other side. They exist at the margins of what we would conventionally define as a painting and articulate a fascination with the surface and the construction of depth also evident, in hindsight, in the viscous surface of works such as Rise (Charlottesville), 2018-19, and the series Femenine in Nine, 2023, which for the first time, employ a dark background. The TRANSpaintings also transform the gallery into a performative, experiential space. This is a space in which one’s shadow, or the shadow of another viewer, might pass through the painting and inform the way we see and experience it.

As complex, multiple and “of this world” as these paintings are, this worldliness is not evoked in the conventional design of white cube gallery space. This is less a comment on the exhibition design of this particular show than on the dominant mode of presenting contemporary art today. What would it mean to invite more of this world into the exhibition space, if not to interpret, then to contextualise these socially and politically engaged works? Would this compromise visual impact, or the hard-won “right to opacity” that theorists such as Éduoard Glissant and artists such as Mehretu, working in an abstract mode, have fought so hard for?

The documentary shown in room 11, Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest by Edgar Howard and Susan Wald, provides important context for Mehretu’s practice and will be essential viewing for many visitors. Mehretu’s paintings are primed to engage with our present—a present as full of beauty, banality, and violence as any. They offer provocative questions with which to leave a distinctive solo exhibition within the context of ambitious international programming at the MCA.

Exhibition
Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory
29 November 2024 – 27 April 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artist, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney and White Cube, London