Earlier canvases by Julie Mehretu referred to maps, architectural diagrams, and urban-planning grids; the artist used an array of vectors and notations that gestured towards global mobilities – as well as global inequities. They are dizzyingly complex and masterful in their use of scale and negative space; they convey a feeling of velocity. In her latest paintings, she embraces a different type of disorientation, producing works in which airbrushed strokes and screen-printed elements are added and erased, invoking a sense of dissipation and loss. Though the details of the underpaintings – based on photographs of a migrant detention centre in Texas, the burned Grenfell Tower in London, and a rally for the far-right Brazilian politician Jair Bolsonaro, for instance – are no longer available to the viewer as pictorial information, this source imagery still has the capacity to register on an emotional level, setting the tone for the completed painting.
