carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce Metoikos (in between paintings) the third solo exhibition of American artist Julie Mehretu. A sense of volatility marks Julie Mehretu’s most recent canvases. Roiling black lines, smudges, eruptions of color, and halftone patterns unfold atop lucid, saturated grounds, which are countered by luminous shapes and fragments that seem to hover above the tangled compositions like a simmering, spectral residue. As the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson notes about the Mehretu’s formal transitions over the past decade, “The clean, centripetal choreography that once stood for the global has given way to contaminated streams and surges.” 

Mehretu considers abstraction a space of unknowing, of possibility—that which offers something beyond language, a space of potential that cannot be articulated otherwise. Painting is thereby a means, in Mehretu’s words, to “think through the struggle in an alternative, abstract way.” Her newest works respond to a diverse set of images related to current events, ranging from immigrant detention centers and social upheaval to ecological disasters. These photographs, some of which she keeps in her studio for months or even years before finding a point of entry for the work, form the “DNA” of the painting. Using Photoshop, Mehretu distorts the image beyond recognition, at times combining multiple images, before building a layered composition with paint, screenprint, airbrush, and ink. Subsumed beneath accumulations of riotous, luminous marks, the specificity and source of the image is sublimated yet remains, as Mehretu claims, the “pain and the source of the image.”