Of-the-moment abstract artist Julie Mehretu opens first solo show in Southern Hemisphere in Sydney

SYDNEY – Ethiopia-born New York artist Julie Mehretu, considered one of the most influential living painters, has opened her first solo show in the Southern Hemisphere in Sydney.

Her large, layered abstract canvases fill the third floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s (MCA) Mordant Wing, curated by MCA Australia director Suzanne Cotter. The show will run until April 27, 2025.

The mid-career artist is “at the peak of her powers”, said Ms Cotter, who has known Mehretu for 15 years.

The biracial artist, whose family was airlifted out of Ethiopia during the civil war when she was seven, was given her first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Europe, her works are also being presented in the Palazzo Grassi at the ongoing Venice Biennale.

MCA’s Julie Mehretu: A Transcore Of The Radical Imaginatory marks the artist’s conquest of three continents.

Rather than a mid-career survey, the MCA exhibition intentionally focuses on 36 paintings completed by the artist between 2018 and 2024, including the nine “black paintings” in Mehretu’s Femenine In Nine cycle (2022-2023) that will be dispersed to private and public collections after the show.

It also includes Mehretu’s new TRANSpaintings (2023-2024), which are presented off the wall and clamped in Brutalist devices sculpted by Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian.

These are painted both front and back, using monofilament polyester mesh as a base, similar to what is used in screenpainting.

The mesh allows Mehretu’s signature marks, airbrushed and directly drawn on in nearly 50 layers, to look indeterminate, shifting depending on the light and perspective of the viewer.

Mehretu, 53, says her works are political, but not in the way one would expect. She often takes photographs – of destruction in the streets of Beirut or Aleppo, or the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – and blurs them so they become “ghostly haunts”.

With this as a base, she uses her vivid imagination and expansive references to create the complex ciphers that she layers upon her work.

She says: “These are things that are happening in the world that are devastating and horrific. There are real lives at stake. There’s this embedded kind of trauma. My work is a response to this visual image that I’m seeing. It’s a very intuitive kind of response, and then it evolves.”

Her Hineni II cycle (2019-2020), for instance, is fiery orange and red, taking Californian wildfires as its departure point while also referencing the persecution of Rohingya people in Myanmar.

The title, meaning “here I am” in Hebrew, is what Abraham says when God appears to him in the form of a burning bush in the Christian Bible. In the same way, Mehretu’s paintings require viewers to be active and present, even if abstraction necessarily precludes them from gaining full understanding.

To attempt to understand Mehretu fully would be futile. Her works pay homage to everyone from Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky to American singer Nina Simone to American composer-musician Julius Eastman.

Mehretu’s Femenine In Nine cycle – a departure for her, as she usually paints on a lighter background – was shaped by her observations of marks in natural rock formations in the Utah desert resembling white spray paint, and the murals of Agia Dynamis in a tiny 16th-century church in central Athens, Greece.

One cycle evokes the Book of Revelation in the Bible; another brings to mind transitional stages of the soul between death and reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy.

“We’re all making in the context of history of our experience and the world we live in,” Mehretu says. “It informs our visual language and common understanding, but through abstraction, I’m trying to find some form of liberatory creativity.”

She goes on to reassure viewers, reaching for the language of music, which she describes as “the spine to which I work”.

“You don’t need to know all the samples that go into the song. If you want, you can try to find out where someone got that beat, or where they got that sample from. But you don’t have to do that to be moved.”

Connecting Mehretu’s paintings are more than 50 of her etchings and paper works, including some she did in the 1990s as a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, United States, all vectors and geometric forms.

A more recent series of large-scale etchings, Stages Of Uprising (2024), done in collaboration with the legendary art workshop and publisher Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, is also being shown for the first time.

Mehretu uses a technique called “a la poupee” to allow a single copper plate to hold multiple colours, dabbing with a small cloth along the incised lines before passing them through the press.

Tickets to the exhibition cost A$28 (S$24.40).

Mehretu recently also completed a monumental 25m by 8m stained-glass work for the Obama Presidential Centre in Chicago in the US – the first time she has tried her hand at the medium. This work will be available for viewing in 2025.