Faced with another looming Trump administration, artist Julie Mehretu feels the first major survey of her work in Australia is well timed.
"Especially right now, it's wonderful to be really far from the United States," she told reporters.
In response to upheaval and uncertainty, the Ethiopian-American artist offers up the release and liberation of abstraction - a radical place where nothing is defined and anything is possible.
Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on Friday, her first show in Australia and, indeed, the southern hemisphere.
It features more than 80 works, from her earliest drawings and printmaking, to the latest monumental paintings.
Of these, seven of Mehretu's most recent TRANSpaintings are on show for the first time.
These are innovative double-sided artworks in acrylics and ink on a translucent polyester mesh, so light shining through the surface forms part of the composition.
They are installed in aluminium structures that are artworks in themselves - sculptures titled Upright Brackets by Iranian artist Nairy Baghramian.
"The brackets are holding them, they're clamped, and yet the paintings have their own breath, have their own force," the artist told AAP.
Mehretu paints both sides at once, working between her studio in Harlem and another in the Catskills in upstate New York.
Her expansive abstractions are created using layers of stencils, airbrushing and painted marks of all kinds.
These fields of gestural marks are endlessly suggestive - some bring to mind electricity, dance parties, or jazz improvisations rendered in paint.
Mehretu is widely regarded as one of the most original contemporary painters, with influences ranging from classical Chinese ink, to the Old Testament, to Japanese manga and music of all kinds.
For those who look, there are references to current events, as well as works named for influential Black artists and intellectuals such as New Dawn, Sing (for Nina) named for singer Nina Simone.
A whole room of recently completed black paintings, titled Femenine in nine, were named for a 1974 composition by American pianist Julius Eastman.
If gallery-goers don't pick up all the references woven into her work, that's fine, said Mehretu.
"It's like experiencing an album. You listen to a song, and if you're interested, you look at the liner notes," she said.
"It opens up many more layers, but you don't have to do that to experience the song and be moved by it."
Mehretu is primarily interested in an emotional response from viewers, and hopes they experience the freedom that can be found in abstraction.
While her work also responds to the unending flow of current affairs, perhaps some comfort can be found in her approach to painting.
"Sometimes big leaps happen, but painting is overall very slow. Things come one after another. It's evolution," she said.
The exhibition runs until April 27.
* AAP travelled with the assistance of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
