Name: Julie Mehretu on the freedom of abstract art
Uploaded: 2025-12-05T04:10:33.000Z
Duration: 4 min 20 s
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There are certain images that stay in our consciousness across the world.

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And these paintings, they're blurred images of really devastating realities of our world right now.

And the contradictions and the complexities in those, all those dynamics and even the polarities of right and left are part of this kind of what I think I'm trying to investigate in these paintings.

Despite any form of effort of annihilation or dehumanization of people and culture, the culture has kind of found a way, and

people have found a way to maintain some form of the spirit and drive of what makes us continue and makes us invent.

And I think it's in that space of invention and imagination that new possibilities can emerge and arise.

When we started to see blurred imagery come into the work, that was a whole new development that we had to figure out how to paint that.

There's two basic ways that we start a painting before Julie, her hand, comes into it.

It's either through silkscreen or through airbrushing these blurred images that she's manipulated through the computer and outputs for me to basically replicate in whatever scale she's working at.

So that's where I really get to participate.

And then Julie takes over and adds her mark, making all the energy, all the dynamism, all the action to the paintings.

I don't necessarily know when it's time to make the first mark or when it's time to make the last mark, but

I usually look at a painting for a long time before I start working on it, and

then usually something summons me up to the painting to start.

And usually the first five or something, I start erasing as soon as I start making it.

So it's really a process of, like, getting really lost in the intuitive making of the painting.

And then through that, trying to make sense of what I made and then going back into that space.

When we wanted to start working on the trans paintings, it took a couple years, three years with experimenting with material and what kind of supports, what kind of fabric worked.

luckily collaborate with Nayari Bagramian in doing a sculptural kind of support for these structures, because I really wanted them to be freestanding.

They become this kind of animatronic, sculptural thing that's standing there.

I'm super excited when I See the room filled with people, and

I see the shadows moving through the paintings.

They kind of affect how you're experiencing a painting.

So if a room has 12 people in it, it's a very different experience than if you're in here by yourself.

I think there's something in these paintings that is very haunting.

And that, to me, feels like the echoes of many ancestors, in a way, many parts of the past.

The scale allows for one to be fully immersed in the painting from when you're up close, and

then to have this very different experience of it from a distance.

And what happens in those indeterminate space.

In that, I try to make sense of why it was always in abstraction that I felt most compelled to work.

I feel like abstraction is, in a sense, what chose me.

But I think there's this liberation and possibility in what we don't have language for.

Especially if you're looking at abstract paintings.

You pull your own personal history into that.

There's this space of radicality, there's this space of possibility, and there's a space of opacity.

And I think that's really important for me in abstraction is that there's no idea of representing oneself.

It's really this exploration of what might be, what can be, and

what exists in this space of, like, invention that's outside of what the world is, in a sense.

I mean, I have a dream of a particular world, but

I don't know that that's what's so important as finding a place of liberty, possibility, and

a real place of kind of vitality and health.

And how do we build that for our communities?

How do we protect our trans kids, our queer brothers and sisters, our indigenous brothers and sisters, our mixed communities?

And how do we, like, really look after one another rather than individually over everybody else?