Swept away by the careering colour-rich compositions of Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu’s surges of colour, line, and geometric form are pretty awesome. Her energetic combinations of painting, drawing, and digital layering processes reflect many aspects of our physical and virtual environments, and yet consistently and engagingly retains their visual abstraction.

Born in Ethiopia and currently based in New York, Julie employs mark-making of many kinds; flat geometric colour-planes and straight angled edges collide with soft feathery textures, and all manner of forms curve and career along a mind-boggling variety of perspectival trajectories. Her images are often painted onto large-scale canvases in ink and acrylic, and have also been published in the form of prints and editions. Her work is often said to be a meditation on global population shifts, urban mapping, and structural planning, and is inspired by source material as diverse as Japanese Zen ink painting and architectural blueprints. Mind, blown.