Above : Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu Pic Josefina Santos
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“There are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in.
It’s overwhelming … the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate.
I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate these complexities and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place.”
Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is one of today’s most acclaimed living painters.
The New York artist’s first exhibition in Australia reveals her commitment to painting as a contemporary art form.
It traces her ongoing engagement with abstraction as a richly layered language, informed by histories of art and mark-making across millennia, from Chinese ink painting and Japanese manga, to histories of abstraction, rock art, literature and music.
Through her art, Mehretu challenges traditional ways of seeing, often blurring distinctions between abstraction and figuration. Her dynamic compositions are populated with brushed, spray-painted, screen-printed and drawn marks.
This exhibition charts a particularly experimental period in Mehretu’s painting, many presented to the public for the first time, including her most recent TRANS paintings.
There are more than 50 works on paper, from the mid-1990s to now, offer a retrospective of the foundational role of drawing and printmaking in Mehretu’s practice, and the cross-fertilisation of these mediums.
The exhibition title is both an example of the artist’s approach to language as something to be sampled and reinvented – not unlike hip-hop or poetry – and of the idea of moving beyond what we know, or think we know, to imagine a better world. For Mehretu, this is truly radical:
‘Abstraction is a strategy. A refusal of description, of language, of containment, of pigeon-holing. Of not being reduced to the body, the skin, a national identity, a place, a language.
Rather, it is a trajectory for a more complex and discursive creative project!
The exhibition JULIE MEHRETHU: A TRANSCORE OF THE RADICAL IMAGINATORY, curated by Suzanne Cotter and Jane Devery, is on display at the MCA until the 4th April 2025. This is a ticketed event.
