In her 2021 documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest, the abstract painter explains that news images have long fueled her art. “I’ve been working with news media images since the mid-90s when I was in school,” she says. “And they’ve always been something that feeds my work, and they’re always the context in which I’m working.”
Many of her monumental artworks feature devastating images sourced from the news, from the “Unite the Right” riots in Charlottesville to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in Britain. But such photographs are intentionally obscured from view. Out of sight, such potent images of death, destruction and displacement are an absent presence. They help build a hidden visual foundation for Mehretu to then push each event into a visual cacophony.
The Ethiopian-American artist, who was one of the best-selling creatives in the world in 2023, is the subject of a buzzy new Australian summer show. “Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) forms part of Sydney’s mega International Art Series. It features thirty-six recent paintings produced by the artist between 2018 and 2024—some being displayed for the first time—as well as more than fifty major prints, drawings and works on paper.
The show comes at a momentous time for the 54-year-old. Mehretu has enjoyed a meteoric rise thanks to a 2020 TIME 100 endorsement; a commission for abstract panels at the Obama Presidential Center; and the major European retrospective of her career, “Ensemble,” at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. That’s also not to mention her generous public philanthropy, including a $2 million donation to the Whitney to give under-25s free entry.
As for “Radical Imaginatory,” it’s most interested in highlighting how the artist’s popular paintings sit within the cultural and political world she mines for material. Themes of subjectivity and opacity sit within these cacophonous optic proclamations.
Mehretu has attracted wide public attention ever since 2009 when her imposing Mural was installed in the Goldman Sachs foyer amidst the Great Recession. Its garish and beautiful interplay of lines nodded to trade routes and interconnected economies across an enormous canvas. But it made many wonder: was the pricey piece a glorified trophy for the investment bank? Or a standout statement of abstraction?
MCA director Suzanne Cotter and senior curator Jane Devery have both done fine work staging this particular show. It’s succinctly structured around two series: Femenine in nine (2022-23), an array of plaintive black paintings that evoke instability in their moodiness, and TRANSpaintings (2023-24), translucent shimmering pieces in which familiar news images have been carefully concealed.
Mehretu remains a contemporary practitioner of abstract expressionism, a movement first fuelled by showing feelings and subjectivity via large-scale, often visually overwhelming, works. Original pioneers of the style, such as Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly, wanted emotions to be telegraphed through colors, painterly gestures and shapes.
Mehretu adds her own touch to this tradition by layering her paintings with subliminal references (only passingly acknowledged in titles and wall texts) to cite our devastating, disastrous and somber realities. Each news photograph carries a simple truth, even if it’s been blasted from visual existence in the end.
The artworks here reverberate with unbridled energy and charged chaos that is exciting to feel up close. But most, like the TRANSpaintings series (which are detached from the wall thanks to installations by Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian), are still tethered to reality.
With source material mined and manipulated from our digital world (like the conflict in Ukraine), TRANSpaintings sits in an in-between state of abstraction. There’s meaning and meaninglessness alike. Viewers are asked to intuit an emotional response to each work while a quiet tangential reference lurks below to true events.
Still, don’t be fooled by the translucence texture in these pieces. There is plenty of substance still there, as the “trans” prefix reminds us we are crossing over.
In hidden images of war, mass migration and political conflict—indeed, often obscured or othered from our daily lives—Mehretu’s ‘radical imagination’ can be found. The compression of news photography and the collaging of signs (coordinates, map markings, migration pathways) across each are both disruptive and expansive to witness.
Mehretu seeks to challenge our interaction with news consumption—and its sometimes anesthetizing tendencies—by wiping over the original image. Then, she goes over each visual base with a new expressive story to elicit a more potent emotional response. And it usually works.
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Hineni II (E.3:4) (2019–20) is one major highlight, a sheer inferno on display that radiates heat with intense fiery colors and dry charcoal accents. An image on the news of the 2017 Northern California wildfires is what first prompted Mehretu to create this intense optical conflagration.
Building on the breadth of references to environmental, political and even biblical issues, Hineni II carries enormous intensity. Its name, “Hineni,” is Hebrew for “here I am,” a declarative statement on literal presence and a reference to Moses’ statement to God when he encountered the fabled burning bush. When taken together, the piece proves a forceful statement on acts of the Almighty amidst our ever-frying planet.
If raging fires elicit a feeling of force, then Femenine in nine elsewhere engenders a feeling of dislocation. The paintings invert Mehretu’s usual approach (of applying black markings on a colored background) by adopting a black canvas with metallic strokes, which blend a graffiti-like aesthetic across a cosmic starscape.
Each work has an iridescence and depth that punctuates the abyss. But most pieces seem less visceral in confronting the real over the imagined on the canvas. The graffiti-esque scrawlings unfortunately also don’t possess the same sound and fury found in others, like Six Bardos: Transmigration (2018) where the wild gestural markings seem already to possess meaning and order.
“Radical Imaginatory” underscores Mehretu’s wondrous artistic imagination while asking a series of provocative questions. What is our response to hidden images of war, conflict and migration when abstracted into art? Can a greater response be felt when banal news images are reimagined?
There’s a temptation to generalize the feeling generated from these many experimental works. But individual subjectivity and unscripted responses are the point with Mehretu. Against a world of relentless media and information—a cacophony of image saturation—these lurid artworks both conceal and bring to light fraught emotional questions. Even if her abstraction sometimes stops us from gaining any immediate clarity, this gesture is the point: to pause and sit in spaces of uncertainty.
“Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory” is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney through April 27, 2025.
