Artist Julie Mehretu opens solo Show in Sydney

Ethiopia-born New York artist Julie Mehretu (right), considered one of the most influential living painters, has opened her first solo show in the Southern Hemisphere in Sydney.

- Clement Yong

Her large, layered abstract canvases fill the third floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia's (MCA) Mordant Wing, curated by MCA Australia director Suzanne Cotter. The show will run until April 27, 2025.

The mid-career artist is "at the peak of her powers", said Ms Cotter, who has known Mehretu for 15 years.

The biracial artist, whose family was airlifted out of Ethiopia during the civil war when she was seven, was given her first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Europe, her works are also being presented in the Palazzo Grassi at the ongoing Venice Biennale.

MCA's Julie Mehretu: A Trans-score Of The Radical Imaginatory marks the artist's conquest of three continents.

Rather than a mid-career survey, the MCA exhibition focuses on 36 paintings completed by the artist between 2018 and 2024, including the nine "black paintings" in Mehretu's Femenine In Nine cycle (2022-2023) that will be dispersed to private and public collections after the show.