Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology)

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce our seventh solo exhibition by Julie Mehretu titled Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology), which will include new and distinct bodies of work from 2024-2026. Presented for the first time in the U.S., a prelude to this body of work was seen in the exhibition Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2024, and Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory at MCA Sydney in 2024-25. The exhibition, Mehretu's fourth solo presentation in New York, will feature a series of live performances under the direction of choreographer John Jasperse, who was invited to create a new dance work in response to Mehretu's works. John Jasperse Projects will perform the piece, Wandering, twice daily over four consecutive evenings from 20-23 May. Referencing "our days, like a shadow" from Chronicles 29:15, and the Buddhist concept of "non-abidance," the show's title augurs life as a series of fleeting and transitory experiences, and existence as a passing shadow in search of enlightenment when walking in darkness. Mehretu explores these metaphors in conceptual and temporal terms, channeling abstraction as a vehicle of liberatory imagination, in her new cycle of Black Paintings, 2025-26 and in her recent collaboration with sculptor Nairy Baghramian, TRANSpaintings/Upright Brackets, 2023-26. Liberated from the picture wall, Julie Mehretu's TRANSpaintings with Nairy Baghramian's Upright Brackets enable a dynamic phenomenology of movement through upright works that invite display and interaction across a vertical expanse of the gallery's first two floors. Permitting a view in and through the surfaces of abstract works which trade opacity for translucence, and the planar surface for three-dimensional space, itinerant shadows and optical effects are absorbed into the artwork, along with the viewer. One discerns the beginning, middle and end—or verso—of a painting. The TRANSpaintings/Upright Brackets build from layers of inks and acrylics on translucent monofilament polyester fabric applied over residual ghost images from recent reportage of geopolitical events. Their permeable mesh surfaces provide an airy transparency antithetical to a canvas' usual dense ground. Buttressed and embraced by the sculptural armatures of Baghramian which surround them, their taught stance emboldens participatory views from both sides, equalizing the relationship between artwork and audience. Bearing witness, the paintings summon the viewer into intimate encounters that fluctuate with each bodily circumnavigation in space. In this flux and multiplicity, ethereal images shift and change around blurs and traces in response to the passage of light, shadow, and corporeal actions in real time, becoming intrinsic to the work itself.