Thursday, December 11, 2025

Essential abstraction * Julie Mehretu

 


The language of architecture and mapping—blueprints, civic plans, urban diagrams—not as static records but as scaffolds for energy, agitation, and upheaval. These centrifugal compositions evoke arenas, parliaments, or protest sites, situating the viewer within the charged choreography of nationalism, revolution, and spectacle. The accumulation of symbols—fragments of flags, echoes of corporate logos, explosive color fields—renders the canvas a volatile stage where power is performed and contested. Drawing from utopian abstraction and the legacy of Constructivism, she does not invoke purity or transcendence but implosion, velocity, and multiplicity. Her layered surfaces function as sedimented histories, each mark a fossil of geopolitical tension, migratory flow, or public delirium. There is no single reading, no stable ground—only movement, compression, eruption. Her abstraction is not retreat but resistance: a form that resists resolution, that holds contradictions in suspension, and that insists on the urgency of visualizing the systemic structures that shape contemporary life.