Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory

The American art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson opens the chapter “About Painting” in her 2015 book Painting Now by referencing Allan Kaprow's tribute to Jackson Pollock, originally published in ARTnews in 1958. Hudson underscores Kaprow’s steadfast admiration for Pollock’s success at almost destroying established notions of conventional painting and reframing it ‘less a medium than as a context for conveying multiple sensory experiences.’^[1]

For Kaprow, Pollock’s practice opened the potentiality of painting to imagine a more developed and exploratory post-medium condition for painting. Further along, Hudson provides an illustrative survey of a variety of contemporary artists whose painting practices, after Pollock, explore this post-medium condition and succeed in energetically reframing many of painting’s functional, material and historical traditions away from its function as a mere image, ‘towards objects that act in space, intervene in sites, or mutate through a performance.’^[2] Paintings that incorporate elements of sound; a more sincere contemplation of space and audience; paintings that focus on an expressivity of imaginary realities; paintings that simultaneously clarify and complicate; paintings that divulge nuance, and dance with movement and touch.

The continuing pluralism of painting—arguably since Kaprow’s 1958 publication, but particularly over the past ten years—is an ongoing victory for painters. Since the early 1960s, painting per se has won some tough battles against a variety of different iterations of ‘aesthetic criticism’ that overwhelmingly have their origins in modernist approaches to painting. One example is how the “language of beauty”, or aesthetics, which examined painting prior to the 1960s, has lost legitimacy. Additionally, the ascent of criticality, visible in evolving theories such as postmodernism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism, has further contributed to this continuing pluralism of painting’s non-allegiance to a homogenous formalism.

If Ethiopian-born, American artist Julie Mehretu has utilised painterly abstraction to respond to contemporary political and historical events, she has done so to poetically integrate the potentiality of painting’s continuing pluralism. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory, is the first large-scale exhibition of Mehretu’s work to be shown in any public institution in Australia, and the first of its kind in the Asia Pacific region.

The exhibition presents as an up-to-date survey exhibition. While a comprehensive retrospective might suggest that Mehretu has reached an end point, it would certainly include a wider range of her work for predominantly Australian audiences unfamiliar with her output.  Julie Mehretu offers the artist’s ongoing explorations into painterly abstraction and its visual language of mark-making, ranging from her captivating works on paper from the mid-1990s to experimental printmaking and the recent TRANSpaintings (2023–24) which premiered in 2023 at White Cube in London.

Of the 36 paintings included in the exhibition, made between 2018 and 2024, it is the TRANSpaintings that ultimately give the exhibition its gravitas. There are several beguiling standout works, however the TRANSpaintings reflect Mehretu’s apotheosis of expressivity through her idiosyncratic and generative postpainterly approach to abstraction. This new, intuitive pictorial language extends “the in-between space” to uncover a curious, infinite elasticity in abstract painting that visually and conceptually sets the work apart from earlier works in the exhibition.

Mehretu’s use of the prefix TRANS relates to notions of crossing over, moving or seeing through, and going beyond. What I experienced when engaging with the TRANSpaintings was an inexplicable form of transparency and movement, wherein no single viewpoint is stable. Instead, a multiplicity of perspectives are unexpectedly and poetically revealed to the viewer. Being among these commanding, free-standing paintings with sculptural aluminium frames—made by Iranian-born German artist Nairy Baghramian—I felt an inter-articulation of internal complexity and an embodied, affective transience between myself, the work and other visitors. ‘All virtual depth of field is flattened so that the paintings become an intimate architecture—a sur-face and inter-face—upon which to gaze both on and through,’ writes Erik Morse in the exhibition’s 224-page catalogue. He continues,

…this strange, optical effect allows two viewers to look simultaneously from both sides of the paintings and to meet one another’s faces. In so doing, the paintings themselves help to bring into intimate contact the abstract face of the Other through the sur-face and inter-face of the canvas.^[3]

In addition to the irreducible nature of the TRANSpaintings is Mehretu’s ability to induce an evocative ephemerality and lightness within the carefully choreographed space — commendable given the cool, uniform austerity of Baghramian’s frame/structures that dominate the exhibition’s largest space. It sets the scene for a puzzling, enjoyable and embodied duplicity.

In its complexity, the dystopian flames of Hineni II (E.3:4) (2019-2020) reflect the expandable, layered and multiple painterly approaches of the TRANSpaintings. Referencing prayers of sacrifice and humility, the painting’s title refers to the Book of Genesis, with Abraham addressing the presence of God in the form of the Burning Bush. When God approached him, Abraham responded, Hineni!, ‘Here I am’ in Hebrew. At the time of the work’s making, persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar was being widely reported. Inevitably, Hineni II (E.3:4) and its description makes me think about Mehretu’s intentions, and how such titles offer an anchor to the transcendental space created through her unique pictorial language.

Paradoxically, Mehretu has spoken about the need to temporarily subordinate rational thinking when beginning a new work, to produce paintings that have no allegiance to fixed positionalities or perspectives. This, I conclude, is “the in-between space” that gives Mehretu’s paintings their semantic intension, and their density. By airbrushing and screen printing digitally manipulated images, taken from mass media sources onto various surfaces, Mehretu’s process dissolves direct visual association with the original news event. The fluidity of this formal device encourages multiple interpretations, enabling Mehretu’s paintings to speak simultaneously to multiple themes: the climate crisis, Californian wildfires, the unceasing brutality of colonialism, horrifying pogroms, the rise of global fascism and cultural ruin among them.

When experiencing Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory, be prepared for a phenomenological experience that necessitates suspension of preconceptions. That is, take your subjectivity with you, as you will find no fixed, rational, universal explanations in this exhibition. Mehretu’s exploratory paintings reveal imploding realities that fall forwards and backwards within rich (beautiful) palimpsest surfaces; paintings that rescind lateral timelines and fixed psychological scaffolding; and paintings that reveal avenues and hidden portals of scrutiny, sovereignty and falsehoods.