The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s newest exhibition marks a milestone for New York-based Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu: her first major solo show in the southern hemisphere.
Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory is happening at a time that is both gloriously and terrifyingly chaotic. “It’s overwhelming,” the artist says in the exhibition’s introductory text. “The accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate.”
But the abstract works on display offer a generous space in which to grapple with this chaos. The exhibition is curated by MCA director Suzanne Cotter and senior curator Jane Devery, and provides an environment in which to sit with complexity, confusion and uncertainty. At times, the show’s 80-plus works even invite us to enjoy feeling unmoored or overwhelmed, and to find beauty in cacophony.
The visual language Mehretu describes as “the language of abstraction” – a way to navigate our oversaturated environment – is strikingly evident.
Immediately to your left as you enter are two giant framed works, Six Bardos: Luminous Appearance (2018) and Six Bardos: Transmigration (2018), reaching almost floor to ceiling. . The pieces are characteristic of Mehretu’s distinctive style, created by building layer upon layer of different kinds of mark-making. Colours coalesce in strange and interesting ways – sometimes blurring or fading into one another; at other times revealing or obscuring what’s underneath. References to works by other artists, architects, cities, histories and events are embedded into the layers, including images from news platforms, although they are not always visible or legible.
Each of these artworks can take Mehretu and her team months or even years to complete. (The process is explained in the documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest, screening in a room near the gallery’s entrance.) The result of this rigorous layering is that abstract, complex, beautiful chaos.
Two recent series of paintings – the ambitious and translucent TRANSpaintings (2023–24) and Femenine in Nine (2022–23) – require audiences to move around them in order to fully see them.
The works comprising Feminine in Nine seem to dance as you move towards or away from them, to the left or the right, and as the light changes in the gallery space. Colours appear and disappear, shimmering across the canvas’s black surfaces as you move.
The TRANSpaintings, meanwhile, use an unusual display technique to encourage movement. The semi-translucent paintings are mounted away from the walls, in freestanding aluminium sculptures (aptly titled Upright Brackets) designed by artist Nairy Baghramian. As you walk 360 degrees around them, each angle offers new details that go in and out of focus.
Their complexity is transfixing, and continually entices you to view them from new angles. Are they holographic? How are the paints changing colour? How does Mehretu achieve the depth that makes you feel as though you could fall into the works’ flat surfaces? Can paintings be alive?
This is where the power of Mehretu’s works lies – engaging us while keeping their mysteries secret. They gently expand our understanding, acceptance and navigation of what it means to be uncertain. And ask us to consider different perspectives. It feels like an important message in these tumultuous and often polarising times.
“This is a time when we need these kinds of moments,” Mehretu said at a recent MCA Australia media preview. “What can happen when you go and stand in front of a painting and get completely moved by that? Or when you go to the opera, or experience a piece of music?
“It is so crucial that we are able to have these experiences, and be able to create and live and continue to invent our lives. To insist on the kind of liberation that we want and deserve.” This exhibition is Mehretu’s insistence.
Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory is open now until April 27, 2025.
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