{"id":809122,"date":"2026-05-20T05:12:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/809122\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T05:12:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:12:13","slug":"julie-mehretu-and-john-jasperse-find-common-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/809122\/","title":{"rendered":"Julie Mehretu and John Jasperse Find Common Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most works by Julie Mehretu<\/a>, her \u201cTRANSpaintings\u201d are abstract. Unusually, they are also translucent, viewable from either side. Which means that as you peer at the layers of squiggly marks and washes of color, you may discern a human figure. That figure might be the shadow of a viewer on the other side. Or it might be a dancer.<\/p>\n

With his \u201cWandering,\u201d<\/a> the choreographer John Jasperse responds to Mehretu\u2019s exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery in TriBeCa, \u201cOur Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology).\u201d<\/a> During performances, Wednesday to Saturday, seven dancers move through the space, arranging their bodies along the white walls and between the archways. Weaving paths around Mehretu\u2019s translucent paintings, they trace ephemeral lines and arcs, brushing by other Mehretu works on the walls \u2014 and by audience members.<\/p>\n

Mehretu is a major American artist whose large, dense paintings \u2014 which often occlude or efface topical source material, like blurred photos of riots or wildfires \u2014 are often read as expressing global turmoil. She was first attracted to working with a choreographer while looking at how her \u201cTRANSpaintings,\u201d which stand in metal brackets by the sculptor Nairy Baghramian, were arranged in another exhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe installation felt a bit like choreography,\u201d Mehretu said in an interview at the Goodman gallery. \u201cI wished there could be some kind of performance in the space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mehretu\u2019s partner, the performance studies scholar Ariel Osterweis, proposed several choreographers. Mehretu was drawn to Jasperse<\/a>, who has been making formally intricate and philosophically searching dances for more than 30 years. (He also directs the dance program at Sarah Lawrence College.)<\/p>\n

Mehretu recalled one of Jasperse\u2019s works as \u201cvery rigorous, very beautiful but also engaged with this other space you couldn\u2019t see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what painting does,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt\u2019s always this one thing suggesting this whole other thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jasperse, for his part, had long admired Mehretu\u2019s work \u2014 and also saw its connection with dance. \u201cThere\u2019s something about energy and movement that felt really choreographic to me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Both artists were aware that mutual admiration wasn\u2019t enough. \u201cHow do we bring something to each other\u2019s work that feels productive?\u201d Jasperse recalled thinking.<\/p>\n

Jasperse knew what he didn\u2019t want: \u201cTo have the painting function as a d\u00e9cor or backdrop or the dance to be there to kinetically animate the gallery.\u201d Instead, the goal was to create a \u201cspace where people can experience Julie\u2019s work and my work,\u201d he said, \u201cand the two are somehow changed by the fact they\u2019re there together.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the two artists began to collaborate, Jasperse noticed similarities in how they worked. \u201cThe way Julie moves from a source into abstraction made me feel totally at home,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of layering that\u2019s not about it being shown, to explain the work, but like a river that runs underneath it because we are trying to grapple with our place in history.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Jasperse, the drive for abstraction is in tension with his materials: human bodies. \u201cWe\u2019re individuals and we have these identities\u201d \u2014 with signs of race, gender, class \u2014 \u201cthat people may or may not read correctly,\u201d he said. His work resists those readings while acknowledging that they can\u2019t be fully evaded. He sees an analogous tension in Mehretu\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n

Mehretu pushed against the idea that abstraction and representation are opposed. \u201cAs artists, we\u2019re trying to question those assumptions, play with them,\u201d she said, noting how the body is fundamental to painting and its history. After watching Jasperse\u2019s most recent dance,<\/a> she told him that it called certain paintings to her mind.<\/p>\n

As a choreographer, Jasperse plays with speed and time, but Mehretu insisted that painting is also a time-based medium. She recalled visiting a museum in Amsterdam with one of her sons and telling him that if he sat with a Rembrandt long enough, things would start to move. \u201cAnd he was like, \u2018They start to move?\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cBut they do. You start to see the painting differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mehretu\u2019s paintings alter with changing light and the observer\u2019s point of view. \u201cHow do you slow people down?\u201d she asked. \u201cThe way the paintings are constantly mutating is part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

For \u201cWandering,\u201d that perceptual play is framed by the architecture of the Goodman gallery. Its building is a former industrial space, sliced in half by walls with small arched apertures. \u201cI realized that it\u2019s like two lungs,\u201d Jasperse said. \u201cI\u2019ve long been inspired by the symmetry of the body \u2014 moving into that and away from it.\u201d This dance, too, includes a lot of mirroring.<\/p>\n

When the gallery is filled with viewers, space might be tight and navigation tricky, especially through those narrow archways. \u201cBut I think there\u2019s going to be something provocative about that intimacy,\u201d Mehretu said. \u201cBeing close to the paintings and this other activity, trying to understand it with your own discomfort, shyness, exhilaration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Challenging their audience, Jasperse and Mehretu challenge themselves. \u201cIf I\u2019m just doing the thing I know how to do, I\u2019m not doing my job,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been moments where we were both kind of lost,\u201d Mehretu said, \u201cbut I don\u2019t think either of us was afraid of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, maybe I was a little bit more afraid,\u201d Jasperse replied, laughing. \u201cWe all have our personalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite its title, \u201cWandering\u201d has a clear direction, an ascension with the dancers up the three floors of the exhibition. While Hahn Rowe\u2019s sound score for the bottom two floors is largely ambient, the sounds that another composer, Will Johnson, created for the top floor include sampled fragments of digitally altered voices. We hear the invitation \u201cfollow me\u201d from dance club tracks and the unmistakable timbre of Nina Simone singing the civil rights-era anthem \u201cI Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

For a performance that is, in Osterweis\u2019s words, about the \u201cliberatory potential of abstraction,\u201d about an escape from legibility and fixed meanings, that Simone sample is remarkably undisguised.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith all the violence we\u2019re consuming on a daily level,\u201d Mehretu said, \u201cit\u2019s not surprising to me that Will would slice into that. What she\u2019s singing about is what these paintings and this performance are trying to do: inhabit this world and not be confined. I get goose bumps just thinking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like most works by Julie Mehretu, her \u201cTRANSpaintings\u201d are abstract. Unusually, they are also translucent, viewable from either…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":809123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[1037,648,1032,27488,1033,171,328883,328881,328885,2581,48218,176175,328882,328884,5228,328887,67,132,68,328888,328886],"class_list":["post-809122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-dancing","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-gallery-manhattan","tag-goodman","tag-jasperse","tag-john","tag-johnson","tag-julie","tag-marian","tag-mehretu","tag-ny","tag-tribeca-manhattan","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-wandering-dance-non-ballet","tag-will-1971"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116605193160663295","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}