Julie Mehretu’s inimitable calligraphic language finds resonant expression in Insile (2013), a vertiginous, architectonic composition that coalesces aerial, cross-sectional and isometric perspectives within a dense network of visual incident. The rigorous methodology that Mehretu employs results in a layering of meticulous architectural drawing and intuitive abstract gestures, including bold geometric pixelation, dynamic lines and feathered brushwork. Mehretu’s process of repeated overpainting visualises an accrual of history that is embedded with her personal response to built environments and political events. Though often grounded in reality, her compositions evolve into what the artist describes as ‘story maps of no location’.

Insile belongs to a body of work produced by Mehretu in her New York studio in the wake of the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests and uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2010. As part of Mehretu’s consideration of spaces of political disquiet, Insile is one of several works by the artist that draw upon photographs of Believer’s Palace, formerly belonging to Saddam Hussein’s complex of presidential properties in Baghdad – an edifice that, following the US-led invasion of Iraq almost a decade earlier, has become known more for its ruined façade and the vast bunker concealed beneath, than for its original presence and purpose. Mehretu’s composition reflects on this site of political conflict through a discordant abstraction that resists formal resolution. Layered accumulations of clear acrylic and ink superimpose her architectural renderings with convulsive geometric and gestural forms – a generative process that inherently unites the act of creation with the erasure of its visual substrate. Each work thus emerges as a palimpsest of atomised graphic textures, where oscillating perspectival depths and varying opacities describe the transformation of architectural and geographical spaces into sites of historical and political projection.

Similarly engaging with the legacies of geopolitical space and social revolution, Mehretu’s four-part painting Mogamma (2012) – created a year before Insile – draws its title from the government building located on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, whose name in Arabic translates to ‘complex’ or ‘collective’. Both works were featured in the artist’s major solo exhibition, ‘Liminal Squared’, held concurrently at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. The monumental Mogamma canvases now reside in prestigious museum collections around the world, including Tate in London, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Equally monumental and gesturally complex, Insile exemplifies the spatial interrogations that define Mehretu’s work from this period. An area of erasure in the upper centre of the canvas deepens the formal dialectic, articulating the tension between emergence and collapse, construction and ruin.

This body of work was the last for which Mehretu relied on cartographic records and architectural schematics as a structural foundation for her compositions. From 2015 onward, she increasingly turned to digital methods as tools for abstraction. Curator Adrienne Edwards identifies a convergence of sensibilities within the artist’s works produced in 2013, where painterly terrains, anchored in ‘a skeletal form of spatial representation’, begin to meet the ‘phantoms of blurred images’ that distinguish her more recent paintings. It is through Mehretu's 'myriad animations of the black line', which are 'at times embedded, at other moments alight', that, as Edwards describes, we can trace the history of art and register the 'magnanimity' of Mehretu's paintings. (Adrienne Edwards, ‘Antecedents in Black’, in Julie Mehretu, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2019, pp.253–55).

Inspired by an array of visual source material and international political coverage, and constructed through intricate layers of detail, the entropic sense of time and place in these paintings compel associations that, however, transcend any single political moment. In turn, these compositions make significant the intersection of politics, architecture and history in shaping collective, social identity. ‘I’m interested in the experience you can have while looking’, Mehretu remarked of this body of work, ‘information that coalesces into something that comes out of the painting towards you […] It becomes a physical experience’.

An ensemble of dizzying perspectives and multitudinous graphic intervention, Insile warrants close and prolonged study, but also demands the viewer to step back to absorb the whole. Recalling the amassed wrecks and ruins of Leonardo da Vinci and the classical history scenes by Théodore Géricault, Insile positions Mehretu as a contemporary master of a new kind of history painting. As curator Douglas Fogle describes, through her dynamic mark-making, Mehretu ‘has created perfect metaphors for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the 21st century, offering us another way of putting the world into the world’.