Julie Mehretu’s paintings reward attention. Canvases are layered endlessly with paint, ink, print and spray paint, obscuring drawings and photographs of historic events and structures. A language of symbols emerges– circles, dashes, stars and other marks crowd the painting to create a snapshot of moments in time. KAIROS / Hauntological Variations at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf is the largest exhibition of Mehretu’s contemporary art in Germany. It features over 100 artworks made over a 30-year career, allowing viewers insights into the development of her distinctive visual language.

The Ethiopian-American painter was born in 1970 in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, but left with her family for the United States in 1977 after the country came under military dictatorship following a coup. This early experience with immigration and authoritarianism inspires her oeuvre, which is concerned with migration, structures of power and resistance. She uses visual art to process events like the Syrian Civil War and destruction of Aleppo, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and large-scale protests by activists in Lebanon, Catalonia and the United States. The exhibition’s co-curator, Sebastian Peter, who is the assistant curator at Kunstsammlung NRW, said in a conversation with STIR, “Ideas about art are often binary: distinctions are made between political art and art for art’s sake, between figurative art and abstract art. But anyone engaging with Mehretu’s work will quickly realise that such simplifications don’t get you very far. There is a very human need to fix meaning, to pin things down—but that need is bound to fail here.”

Mehretu’s pull towards signifiers and small, almost hieroglyphic characters is seen in her early works from the 1990s, such as the ink painting Timeline Analysis of Character Behavior (1997). A series of untitled paintings from the mid-2000s depicts the thunderous, billowing shapes she uses to great effect in her later, larger works. The exhibition proceeds primarily chronologically, moving through Mehretu’s techniques, mediums, source materials and aesthetic as they shift and transform over decades. In Rise of the New Suprematists (2001), she addresses the art movement Suprematism, which inspires the expressive, geometrical forms in her work. Peter elaborated on the process of organising Mehretu’s huge body of work, saying, “It is essential to show visitors how Mehretu works and what exactly happens in her process of abstraction. [The exhibition] guides visitors from room to room, making clear how her abstraction process has evolved and what has remained consistent.”

One of Mehretu’s most recognisable works, Black City (2007), depicts castle and fortification walls, overwhelmed by markings and colourful waves moving in every direction. The rebellious, lively marks—stars, ticks, banners, flags—seem at odds with the solid architectural forms underneath and the political institutions, machinations and power they represent. Further in the exhibition are works from the artist’s ‘grey period’ where she began working in a monochromatic colour palette, steadily decentering and eventually removing the architectural drawings from her paintings. This started with Chimera (2013), which is focused on the architecture of Saddam Hussein’s bunker and its decimation following bombings by the United States. Mehretu digitally manipulates journalistic photographs and transfers them onto canvas through projection or sketching, using spray-paint, airbrush or screenprints to achieve a blurred effect.

This way of working—simultaneously isolating a specific moment and locating echoes of history and the future within it without tying it down to a recognisable timeline—is a study in contradiction that is illuminated by the title of the exhibition. ‘Kairos’, in ancient Greek philosophy, translates to ‘the right or critical moment’ as compared to Chronos, which references chronological time. While Mehretu works with explosive, decisive moments in history, these moments and their presence are obscured in her paintings, leaving ghostly traces. Hauntology, a portmanteau of haunting and ontology coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is concerned with the persistence and return of spectres from a sociocultural past—atemporal stories, ideas and conditions—that haunt the present. In paintings like Panoptes (2022), the documentary imagery of a historical moment, in this case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, becomes a ghostly underpainting grounding the colourful spray paint shapes and lines that arc across it. 

This period in the visual artist’s work is marked by her expanding relationship with colour and a new freeness to her brushwork and characters, now less cramped and more sinuous. Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve) (2019–20) mobilises the colours of the Brazilian flag to draw a throughline between the corrupt former President Bolsonaro of Brazil and the novel Loop by Mexican author Brenda Lozano, which is an elliptical, fragmented journal of a young woman, ruminating on themes ranging from loss and longing to gang violence and corruption. Mehretu uses stencils, silkscreen printing, airbrushing and projections to evoke currents, glitches and sound waves. Her work has often been compared to the improvisational style of jazz, with Mehretu citing musicians like John and Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry as key influences. The jazz album, MASS {Howl, eon} (2017), by American musician Jason Moran, inspired by Mehretu’s diptych Howl, eon (I, II) (2017), is part of KAIROS.

Peter reflected on the significance of Mehretu’s oeuvre, saying, “Given our present moment, shaped by crisis, I also believe that Mehretu’s early works can serve as a starting point for reflecting on historical change: in times when it can be difficult to zoom out, Mehretu’s early paintings function as ‘petri dishes of history’. What does historical change mean? What is progress? Where are we headed?”

Mehretu’s new series TRANSpaintings abandons traditional canvas in favour of a polished, translucent acrylic screen over polyester mesh—a new way to play with light, shadow and blurring. The screens are ensconced in aluminium frames created by Iranian contemporary artist Nairy Baghramian as part of her Upright Brackets series. Mehretu’s commitment to experimentation and iteration sees her move skilfully between mediums to capture ‘critical moments’ and their echoes into the past and future. Her paintings mirror the complex histories they question and critique.

‘KAIROS / Hauntological Variations’ will be on view from May 9 – October 12, 2025, at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.