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Sunday 16 February

Julie Mehretu: The Architect of Contemporary Chaos

Published on: 20 November 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 5 minutes

Julie Mehretu transforms the structural violence of our era into a dizzying aesthetic experience. Her monumental canvases, intertwining architectural plans and gestural marks, embody the complexity of a world in constant flux, marked by climate disasters and social upheavals.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! Julie Mehretu (born in 1970) is undoubtedly one of the greatest alchemists of our time, transforming the chaos of the world into abstract whirlwinds of dizzying beauty. She metamorphoses our collective nightmares—wars, climate disasters, forced migrations—into visual symphonies that confront us with our own powerlessness in the face of history.

While some gush over 19th-century daubs depicting hunting scenes in the Fontainebleau forest, Mehretu throws the urgency of our times in our faces with a mastery that would make Leonardo da Vinci blush. She doesn’t paint to decorate your bourgeois living rooms; she paints to shake your dormant consciences.

Her first theme is her unique ability to create impossible architectural spaces, mental cartographies that defy all Euclidean logic. Take Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation (2001)—a monumental work that shatters our spatial bearings as if Einstein had dropped acid with Piranesi. Airport plans, stadiums, and public squares intertwine in a macabre dance evoking what Walter Benjamin called the “angel of history”, a powerless witness to accumulating catastrophes.

Mehretu doesn’t dabble in conceptual frippery to impress the gallery. She appropriates the legacy of Western geometric abstraction—from Malevich to Sol LeWitt—to implode it from within. As Jacques Derrida so aptly theorized, she practices a radical deconstruction of dominant systems of representation. Her successive layers of architectural drawings, covered with acrylic veils and sanded down to create a quasi-archaeological surface, perfectly embody what Gilles Deleuze called the “fold”—that zone of indeterminacy where inside and outside merge.

The second theme of her work is her unique way of embodying social movements and popular uprisings in the very materiality of her painting. In Black City (2007), gestural marks seem to come alive as an angry crowd, surging across the canvas like a tsunami. These calligraphic traces evoke what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”—those moments when the established order wavers, and new forms of visibility become possible.

Mural (2009), a fresco the size of a tennis court commissioned by Goldman Sachs for $5 million, is in fact a conceptual time bomb. It takes the visual codes of financial capitalism—stock charts, architectural plans, corporate logos—and blows them up in a pictorial maelstrom that exposes the fragility of the entire system.

What I admire about Mehretu is her ability to transform the structural violence of our era into an aesthetic experience that grabs you by the gut. Her recent paintings, like Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018), begin with images from current events—California wildfires, the destruction of Rohingya villages—which she digitally blurs before overlaying them with her characteristic marks. The result is hypnotic, as if Turner had access to Photoshop and 24-hour news channels.

Unlike so many contemporary artists who recycle the same old modernist recipes, Mehretu invents a new pictorial language for our era of global chaos. She understands that abstraction is not an escape from reality but, on the contrary, the only way to grasp the dizzying complexity of our present. The most abstract art retains traces of the social precisely in its process of abstraction.

Her work echoes philosopher Paul Virilio’s reflections on the “dromosphere”—that accelerated space-time where events collide at the speed of light. In her most recent paintings, like A Mercy (after T. Morrison) (2019), gestural traces seem to be sucked into a spatiotemporal vortex, as if the painting itself were caught in history’s dizzying acceleration.

What makes Mehretu so significant today is that she creates works that resist the rapid consumption of images while capturing the explosive energy of our era. Her paintings are not windows onto the world but distorting mirrors reflecting the terrifying complexity of the present. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “the painter brings his body”—and Mehretu brings hers with all its history of displacement and hybridity.

Superficial critics see her work as a sophisticated version of action painting. But that misses the point: Mehretu reinvents history painting for the age of social networks and climate change. Her canvases are visual thinking machines that force us to reconsider our relationship to time, space, and power.

I’m fascinated by how she uses architecture as a metaphor for institutional power. The building plans she incorporates into her works—from the Roman Colosseum to contemporary office towers—are symbols of the control systems structuring our lives. But under her brush, these rigid structures dissolve into controlled chaos, evoking what Michel Foucault called heterotopias—other spaces where social norms are suspended.

Her masterful use of transparency and opacity echoes Édouard Glissant’s reflections on the “right to opacity”. In her successive layers of painting and drawing, Mehretu creates zones of resistance to forced clarity, spaces where meaning remains deliberately ambiguous. It’s a political as well as aesthetic lesson.

Jaded collectors who buy her works at astronomical prices think they own a piece of contemporary art history. What they fail to understand is that Mehretu is actually selling them a mirror reflecting their own complicity with the power systems she deconstructs. That’s what I call a conceptual boomerang!

Her recent exhibition at the Venice Biennale proves she hasn’t lost her radical edge. On the contrary, her work gains urgency as the world sinks deeper into chaos. Her new paintings on polyester mesh fabric, the TRANSpaintings, are among her most daring works to date. By allowing light to pass through the pictorial surface, she literally creates new spaces of possibility.

Mehretu stubbornly refuses ease. She could have stuck to the winning formula of her architectural paintings from the 2000s that made her reputation. Instead, she continues to experiment, take risks, and push the limits of what painting can say and do in our time.

Her latest masterstroke? Donating more than $2 million to the Whitney Museum to enable free admission for those under 25. Here’s an artist who understands that art only makes sense if it remains accessible to those who need it most. While some artists collect Ferraris, Mehretu invests in the future.

Yes, her paintings can seem intimidating at first, with their complex layers of historical and theoretical references. But that’s precisely their strength: they demand real engagement from us, an effort of thought that goes beyond the passive consumption of images. That’s perhaps the greatest gift an artist can give us.

Julie Mehretu is not just a great artist; she’s a seer reading the entrails of our era. Her paintings are navigation charts for a world that has lost its bearings. If you don’t understand her work, perhaps it’s because you’re not ready to face the truth it reveals about our present.

Reference(s)

Julie MEHRETU (1970)
First name: Julie
Last name: MEHRETU
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • Ethiopia

Age: 55 years old (2025)

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