Mehretu's furious scrawls bite deeper than Bourgeois's spiders – review

★★★★★/★★ ☆☆☆

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
In these two contrasting solo shows, Julie Mehretu’s great and tragic introspections speaks starker truths that Louise Bourgeois’s trite and silly images

Now and then an artist comes along who turns every critical cliche on its head and proves the experts know nothing about where art is going. Julie Mehretu is one of those heroes. This Ethiopian-born, New York-based painter works in a style that has long been mocked and patronised by avant garde intellectuals as macho, pompous and even an instrument of US imperialism – a style that flourished in New York some 60 years ago. Mehretu is an abstract expressionist. And she is showing that the legacy of Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly can bite deep into the madness of our time.

Mehretu takes on those titans at their own game of colossal ambition. Her 2017 diptych Howl consists of two abstract paintings 27 feet high and 32 feet wide that make Pollock’s One look teeny. Meanwhile, she has a show at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge that is smaller in size yet just as formidable and infectiously creative.

Sex and death seem to be fighting it out in these pounding headaches of graphic intensity

Continue reading...