Artwork title: Mashes (Mhos)

Poster dimensions: 50 × 70 cm

Mashes (Mhos) (2018–2019)

This work belongs to Mehretu's important recent large-scale paintings in ink and acrylic. It was exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale and later in her major solo retrospective.

Background and visual layers: the underlying imagery in these works often comes from real scenes of political or social conflict, such as the Arab Spring, protests at the U.S. border or wildfires caused by extreme weather. Mehretu digitally blurs, enlarges and prints these photographs onto canvas, creating an emotionally charged form of background noise. She then overlays them with frenzied, energetic black ink lines, spray paint and other marks.

Meaning: the words Mashes, suggesting a pulp or mixture, and Mhos, a unit of electrical conductance and the reciprocal of the ohm, evoke the transmission of energy and the dissolution of disorder. The painting captures collective anxiety and tension amid social upheaval. Recognizable scenes of protest or disaster are transformed into a fast-moving, almost symphonic release of abstract energy.

Poster / Glossy Paper

Artist Julie Mehretu (born 1970) is known for her large-scale abstract paintings. Born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to an Ethiopian father and an American mother, she moved with her parents to Michigan in the United States in 1977. In 2020, Time magazine named her one of its 100 most influential people. According to available information, her works have achieved total auction sales of approximately US$220 million, making her one of today’s bestselling living women artists. Renowned institutions such as MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum have collected her work since the early 2000s and credit Mehretu with “reinventing abstraction” in the 21st century.