Urgency, energy and interconnectedness underpin the stellar practice of Ethiopian-born New Yorker, Julie Mehretu, whose work will make its Australian debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) this summer.
Often monumental in scale, Mehretu’s unique language of abstraction straddles the history of painting and architecture alongside contemporary themes such as global capitalism, climate change and migration. “Abstraction is something that you cannot define, you cannot necessarily hold it,” Mehretu says of her experiential paintings, “there is an opaqueness to how you think about and how one experiences the painting.”
Audiences have connected with Mehretu’s luminous work most recently at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and at the Sharjah Biennial, Gwangju and Venice Biennales. Curator Jane Devery says that Museum of Contemporary Art is the first venue to present a solo exhibition of Mehretu in the southern hemisphere. It’s a distinct opportunity for audiences to view the artist’s impressive and multi-layered practice.
“Her extraordinary TRANSpaintings (2023-2024) are an exciting recent development,” says Devery. “These free-standing paintings, which are framed in aluminium sculptural supports made in collaboration with the Berlin-based sculptor Nairy Baghramian, are intricately layered and translucent, inviting a viewing experience that is dynamic and constantly changing.”
A historical overview of Mehretu’s drawings will also be shown alongside a recent body of iridescent gestural paintings, Femenine in nine (2023). They proffer a heady visual and sonic meditation on the conditions of darkness and instability that define the contemporary era.
A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory
Julie Mehretu
Museum of Contemporary Art
29 November—27 April 2025
This article was originally published in the November/December print issue of Art Guide Australia.
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