You can’t escape the news. It’s on your phone, your TV; it’s 24 hours, it’s non-stop. It’s even in your bloody abstract art. The works here in Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu’s new show, all totally abstract, are inspired by news events: the Californian wildfires, attempted Catalonian independence, white supremacy rallies. The result is a series of vicious, angry, emotive paintings that express a huge amount of pain without having to say much at all.
The downstairs works are big and colourful. Bright orange, neon pink, pastel blue works covered in black marks that stutter and strafe wildly. Some of the black is solid, bold; some of it is soft, skittery. Upstairs, things are softer, grey, more subdued. But everywhere you look, you find tangible emotion.
What’s so impressive is that Mehretu’s scribbles are instantly recognisably hers. We’ve had more than a century of abstract art, but with just a handful of wrist flicks, Mehretu creates things that look immediately like Mehretu paintings. This is her abstract vocabulary.
In the maelstrom of criss-crossing lines and marks, that vocabulary binds together into a grammatical structure, a visual language. These paintings end up feeling like works of automatic writing, screaming out the artist’s feelings. It’s not the news, really, it’s the effect of the news – and that’s a lot more interesting.
