The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) today opened the first major survey in Australia and the Asia Pacific region of renowned Ethiopian American artist Julie Mehretu, presented for its Sydney International Art Series 2024–2025 summer exhibition.

Julie Mehretu (b. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1970) is one of today’s most acclaimed living painters. The New York artist’s first exhibition in Australia reveals her commitment to painting as a contemporary art form. Described by the New York times as 'one of today's most original and thought-provoking painters’, her works speak to the power of art to express the dynamic and intersecting movement of history, people and cultures that shape our understanding of the world. Using abstraction as a richly layered language, her works are informed by the histories of art and mark-making across millennia, from Chinese ink painting and Japanese manga to rock art, literature and music.

Julie Mehretu: A transcore of the radical imaginatory at MCA Australia charts an explosively experimental period in Mehretu’s art and includes more than 80 works by the artist, including significant loans from public and private collections. The exhibition features 36 paintings completed by the artist between 2017 and 2024 alongside several major new painting cycles completed in 2023 and 2024. Many works are presented to the public for the first time, including Mehretu’s most recent Transpaintings (2023–2024), while over 50 etchings, drawings and works on paper, from the mid-1990s to now, offer a retrospective of the foundational role of drawing and printmaking in the artist’s practice.

Painting, for Mehretu, is the result of dynamic collaboration; from master printers and the assistants who work with her in her studio, to the artists, musicians, writers and poets that inspire her. Through her art, Mehretu challenges traditional ways of seeing, often blurring distinctions between abstraction and figuration. Her dynamic compositions are populated with brushed, spray-painted, screen-printed and drawn marks.

Curated by Suzanne Cotter, MCA Australia Director, with Jane Devery, MCA Australia Senior Curator, Exhibitions, Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory charts the artist's continually evolving investigations into the possibilities of abstraction and its vocabulary of mark-making, from her earliest works on paper to her experimental printmaking, and most recently, the TRANSpaintings series which encourages visitors to experience painting in an entirely new way.

Among the exhibition’s highlights are Femenine in nine (2023–2024), a cycle of exuberant black paintings inscribed with iridescent gestural marks. Named after the 1974 musical composition by Julius Eastman, they offer a visual and sonic meditation on conditions of darkness and instability that define the contemporary moment.

Also featured are the Transpaintings, seven of which are presented for the first time. Supported by the sculptures Upright Brackets by Berlin-based sculptor Nairy Baghramian, these freestanding paintings are physically and visually dynamic and propose an experience of painting as both embodied and participatory.

Julie Mehretu who is in Sydney for the opening of the MCA Australia exhibition spoke about her work, ‘There are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in. It’s overwhelming... the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate. I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate these complexities and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place’.

MCA Australia Director, Suzanne Cotter said about the exhibition: ‘The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia is proud to be presenting to audiences in Australia this remarkable exhibition by an artist who is undoubtedly one of today’s most exciting living painters and whose dynamic language of abstraction speaks so powerfully to the contemporary world in which we live. The experience of Mehretu’s paintings is nothing short of a visual and physical event. We are proud to present this year’s Sydney International Art Series with Julie Mehretu to build upon the MCA’s history of introducing to the public in Australia the work of today’s most influential artists’.

Documentary

A new documentary, Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest, will also screen as part of the exhibition. The film traces the artist’s mid-career survey exhibition, co-organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It shows the artist’s preparations for the exhibition, leading up to its installation and realisation at LACMA in 2020. The film also includes extensive commentary by Mehretu on her work, process and the evolution of her career, alongside interviews with art world friends and associates.

Publication

Published by MCA Australia to coincide with the exhibition, Julie Mehretu: A transcore of the radical imaginatory (hardcover, 224pp, $95) features a comprehensive overview of works in the exhibition and contributions by American author and rock writer Erik Morse, Suzanne Cotter and a conversation between Julie Mehretu, Australian artist Daniel Boyd and Jane Devery. The catalogue is available to purchase from the MCA Store.

Public program

A series of talks, workshops, film screenings and performances will accompany the exhibition, including a free Family space: drawn together which offers free hands-on art-making activities, self-led Drop-in drawing sunday sessions accompanied by a musical playlist by Mehretu. A series of three Up late: Julie Mehretu events will take place on Wednesday nights throughout January 2025, presented as part of the 2025 Sydney Festival. The exhibition will also be featured as part of the Sydney Festival season.

MCA Australia would like to thank Strategic Sponsor of this exhibition Destination NSW. The Sydney International Art Series was created in 2010 by the NSW Government’s tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW, in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales, to bring the world’s most outstanding exhibitions exclusively to Sydney.