Julie Mehretu on haunting, reckoning and accidental magic

In the cavernous concrete halls of White Cube Bermondsey, where a pin drop might trigger an indefinite echo, and one more watt might induce dazzlement, Julie Mehretu has created something which is not just for looking at, but through; for dancing with, not just standing before.

On the night of her opening, Mehretu glides around the galleries haloed with the glow of a rockstar, with a jacket to match. She is ambushed by fellow art titans who embrace her and shower her with congratulations. The art world can be rife with hollow praise, but this time, for this show, it is unequivocally due.

When we speak the following week via Zoom from New York, Mehretu is apologetic; for being six minutes late, and for keeping her camera off (owing to a night of rare insomnious disturbance). In spite of this, her sharp zest radiates from the blackened screen.

Her White Cube show, ‘They departed into their own country another way (a 9x9x9 hauntology)’ is titled after a verse from Matthew 2:12, in which the magi are warned against returning to Herod after paying their respects to the infant Jesus. Mehretu says she was drawn to how the “apparition or dream was really about questioning power,” before linking the text to the crumbling of contemporary power structures. “We are in a moment of reckoning with impossibilities and complications in the structure of the nation-state in our world. We see that collapsing by different forms of crisis”, she says. “There is distrust in how those systems are working.”

Mehretu, who was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970 and fled political turmoil to the US seven years later, has made her mark as one of the most significant artistic voices of a generation. Her approach blends the tropes of Futurism, Op Art, Constructivism, calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism with another, more ineffable ingredient, to visualise shifts in socio-politics, particularly revolution. This month at Sotheby’s, her work set a new auction record for an African-born artist with Untitled (2001), which sold for $9.32 million.

Creating a Julie Mehretu work is no mean feat (she once created a mural – an intricate mapping of the paths to the 2008 financial crash – the size of a tennis court for the lobby of Goldman Sachs). She works from two studios in New York, and an additional space upstate, near to the non-profit residency she co-founded called Denniston Hill. She conjures an image of studio life as a hive of progression and perfection involving a staff of around eight, many of whom are artists working part-time for Mehretu to allow space for their own practices: “you can’t work full-time somewhere else and full-time for yourself”, she asserts.

Her process often involves blurring, distorting, and layering internet-sourced images via Photoshop. From there, the distorted images are translated into paint by a studio assistant via a complex surfacing process (occasionally involving 50 layers of material) and that’s all before Mehretu begins painting on top.

Her source material for the White Cube paintings was the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Capitol insurrection attempt of 2021. Mehretu recalls watching the latter from her studio. “I was really interested in the fervour of what was happening in that march. There was this intense malice and expression in many people during the January 6 event, but there was also this intense conviction.”

“I’m a child of revolution. Something that fascinates me with these kinds of movements is this kind of explosion of protests in squares… this huge gesture… people think it can’t get worse and it always gets worse”, she says. “It was just a glimpse into what can be really terrifying about the stoking of this division and polarisation – which is continuing more and more – especially race-based. It’s the haunting of that history, a kind of rekindling, or digging up of those ghosts, then bringing that history back right front and centre, into our faces.” Mehretu is interested in patterns of human behaviour that recur periodically despite a visceral knowledge of the devastation they cause – ‘why are we stuck in this loop?’

Mehretu’s new work explores the line between protest – citing the Black Lives Matter marches of the year before – and violent insurrection. “I was interested in that strange space between the two polarities, and the idea of tearing it all down and starting again, having been a person who’s come from that, and how dangerous that can be. I was interested in the haunting of what happens in those images.” Another source image shows a member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces training to throw Molotov cocktails to defend Kyiv. But we will never see any of those images; Mehretu has abstracted them to oblivion. What’s left are traces, not described, or legible, but sensed.

At White Cube, we see these optical games in full force. The show’s title work – a vast 3.7 x 4.9 metres – demonstrates that in illusion, matter lives not only on the surface but also deep within; a void between two layers, a void so vacuous you could push your hand through a gap in the graffitied splinters of red white and blue and get sucked right into the blur. From two dimensions, Mehretu conjures a third.

For the show, Mehretu engaged in a ‘duet’ with sculptor Nairy Baghramian. The Iranian-born artist is known for works that fuse architecture and anthropomorphism. One of these is now paired with Mehretu’s title work: a dappled aluminium slab that looks like something a body once occupied. “You really feel a sense that something has occurred there. “I even see certain shapes in that sculpture that feel like they’re in the painting. You’ll see these erased marks in the paintings or absence of something that feels like the absent spaces in those sculptures.”

Mehretu and Baghramian met in 2017 when the latter had her first show at Marian Goodman New York. Then they exhibited in the same space within Ralph Rugoff’s 58th Venice Biennale exhibition and became fast friends. “I was very taken by her work from the first time I saw it,” she says. “I feel that there was this reluctance of representation in both of our works, but that viscerally you feel these similarities, the potential that can exist in something abstract. We both come from histories of experiencing a certain kind of loss of home and have experienced co-opted revolutions and had our families displaced. We’ve witnessed certain things that you don’t lose. Whether you can recall those memories or not all the time, they’re in you, cellularly.”

In the far gallery – an ambitious space for any artist to fill – three dimensions become four. One night, Mehretu and Baghramian were chatting about the former’s upcoming show, when they landed on an idea. Mehretu needed her new TRANSpaintings to be viewable from both sides; Baghramian had a solution. The results are floor-to-ceiling aluminium support structures created by Baghramian to clamp and frame the translucent paintings. Artist dialogues are a well-trodden path in exhibition-making, but rarely are they so interlinked; each component so reliant on the other to function. They coerce viewers into a dance routine through the labyrinth, their shadows trapped, for a moment, on the vibrant polyester mesh.

In the final gallery space are Mehretu’s Femenine in nine paintings, titled in homage to a 1974 song by Julius Eastman. Dark voids are offset by iridescent dashes and scrawls; like the dazzle of oil slick, each turns a new colour – or performs a vanishing act – with every movement. For these, Mehretu used a special iridescent ink she found by accident when picking up the wrong bottle in a Berlin art supplies shop, but it could just as well be sorcery. “I call it the magic ink because for the first two weeks, we had no idea what was happening,” she laughs.

I left White Cube with questions, and acidic shards still swimming on my retinas. I left the interview with Mehretu thinking about how magic disappearing paint might relate to the angst of now. Then I remembered that Mehretu had already said it: “What do you believe? What reality are we really in? It’s hard to know what sources to trust. One has to be very diligent to actually know what’s happening.”