Julie Mehretu Captures Our Contemporary Chaos In Shimmering Abstract Paintings Artsy

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Julie Mehretu's latest New York exhibition turns abstraction into a record of pressure, memory, and political weather

At Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, Julie Mehretu's newest solo exhibition,“Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology),” frames painting as a way of holding contradiction rather than escaping it. On view through June 6, the show brings together new work from the artist's“TRANSpaintings/Upright Brackets” series and a fresh group of“Black Paintings” made in 2025–26.

Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, Mehretu moved to the United States during the Ethiopian Revolution, a displacement that continues to shape the emotional charge of her work. Over the past two decades, she has become one of the most closely watched painters of her generation, known for compositions that braid architecture, urban planning, calligraphic marks, maps, and references to global events into dense, shifting fields. Her career milestones include inclusion in the Carnegie International and a 2005 MacArthur fellowship. Her work has also appeared at the 2015 Sharjah Biennial, the 2019 Venice Biennale, and in a commission for the façade of the Obama Presidential Center.

The new exhibition extends that trajectory while sharpening its focus. Mehretu has long drawn from news photography, protest imagery, war, and catastrophe, then obscured those sources through erasure and layering. Here, she returns to that method with ink and acrylic paintings on monofilament polyester mesh, a support that lets light pass through the surface and gives the works an unusually spectral quality. The images are not meant to be read literally. Instead, they hover between recognition and disappearance, suggesting the afterimage of a place or event without fixing it in one frame.

That ambiguity is central to the exhibition's force. Mehretu has said that since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, she has been working through a political atmosphere that feels“shocking and scary” as well as haunting, one that reopens difficult histories in the United States. In the gallery, that unease becomes formal: layers of mark, shadow, and transparency accumulate until the paintings seem to register both the event and its aftermath.

The freestanding works are presented in aluminum, scaffolding-like frames designed by Iranian German artist Nairy Baghramian, adding another sculptural register to the installation. The result is less a sequence of paintings than a spatial argument about how images circulate, how they fail, and how abstraction can still carry the weight of the world.

Mehretu's exhibition suggests that the most urgent abstraction today may be the kind that refuses simplification, allowing history, politics, and perception to remain unsettled at once.

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