Installation view, ‘Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Warrang/Sydney, 2024. Image courtesy of Julie Mehretu and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. © Julie Mehretu. Photograph: Zan Wimberley

Julie Mehretu, Femenine in nine, part 1, 2023, ink and acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy and © Julie Mehretu. Photograph: White Cube

Julie Mehretu, TRANSpaintings (oneiromancer), 2023, ink and acrylic on monofilament polyester mesh in an aluminium sculpture, and Upright Brackets by Nairy Baghramian. Installation view, ‘They departed for their own country another way (a 9x9x9 hauntology)’, White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2023. Image courtesy and © Julie Mehretu and White Cube. Photograph: Theo Christelis

Julie Mehretu, Haka (and Riot), 2019, ink and acrylic on canvas. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Andy Song. Image courtesy and © Julie Mehretu. Photograph: Tom Powel Imaging

‘A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ is the first Australian retrospective of Julie Mehretu. Based primarily in New York, Mehretu traces her family origins to revolutionary Ethiopia, which informs her practice and its connections to radical discourses, encompassing subjects including migration, multiculturalism and racial conflict. Mehretu is also interested in the philosophy of language, and has spoken of how her work functions semiotically.

Highlights from ‘A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ include a cycle of exuberant black paintings, Femenine in nine (2022-23), named after a piece by American composer and pianist Julius Eastman. The exhibition also centres a series of paintings titled TRANSpaintings (2023-24), presented in concert with a work by Nairy Baghramian, Upright Brackets (2023). Baghramian’s sculptures act to support Mehretu’s freestanding paintings and illustrate a puissant collaboration between the two artists. Mehretu’s paintings are boldly contemporary, layered and multidimensional, and draw from photos of historical protests and demonstrations, translating them into a mélange of dynamic lines, gestures and colours.

Mehretu speaks openly about the “sombreness” of her paintings in the Trump era, as well as the sense of innovation that came with “pushing boundaries” during Obama’s administration. Mehretu emphasises the layered nature of her paintings and how such layering is evident in her use of media and material as well as her use of subjects and reference points. The exhibition is accompanied by a film, Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest, which traces the artist’s mid-career survey, co-organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020. The film features the artist commenting on her work as well as interviews with friends and collaborators.

Reflecting on her art in preparation for the opening, Mehretu said, “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.” Mehretu is an accomplished abstractionist who shows how colour and form can provide a window to historical struggle—and her vision of movements of social change shows that colour itself is indeed radically imaginatory.

Vanessa Francesca, Warrang/Sydney

‘A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 27 April 2025.