Julie Mehretu: Sextant

White Cube presents an exhibition of new work by Julie Mehretu at Mason’s Yard. Featuring large-scale paintings and etchings, the exhibition highlights Mehretu’s use of gestural abstraction as a conduit for evocative and charged emotion and intellectual enquiry.

Glenn Ligon has described the artist’s work as ‘traversed by history […] grounded in urgent political and social questions while simultaneously troubling the limits of abstract painting.’[1] In these new paintings, which continue from the ‘Conjured Parts’ series begun in 2015, Mehretu employs a broad spectrum palette to create powerful, animated, complex canvases. Marking a continued departure from her earlier work which focused on a layered language of mapping and architectural detail, these paintings take the immediacy of a news photograph as their starting point. These include images of such recent pivotal junctures as the rallies of independence in Catalonia; the voracious wild fires of California; the violent white supremacy rally and counter rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the instantaneous outbreak of Muslim ban protests throughout the United States; and the Grenfell Tower fire in London.

[1] Glenn Ligon. ‘On the Ground’, Grey Paintings, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2017

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