Julie Mehretu - Sextant

Featuring large-scale paintings and etchings, the exhibition highlights Mehretu's use of gestural abstraction as a conduit for evocative and charged emotion and intellectual enquiry. Glenn Ligon has described the artist's work as 'traversed by history [...] grounded in urgent political and social questions while simultaneously troubling the limits of abstract painting.' In these new paintings, which continue from the 'Conjured Parts' series begun in 2015, Mehretu employs a broad spectrum palette to create powerful, animated, complex canvases. Marking a continued departure from her earlier work which focused on a layered language of mapping and architectural detail, these paintings take the immediacy of a news photograph as their starting point. These include images of such recent pivotal junctures as the rallies of independence in Catalonia; the voracious wild fires of California; the violent white supremacy rally and counter rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the instantaneous outbreak of Muslim ban protests throughout the United States; and the Grenfell Tower fire in London.