Don't Look at These Paintings, Move Around Them

Why It Matters

By making trauma and geopolitical tension physically visible, the work forces audiences to confront instability, reshaping how art can comment on and influence public perception of conflict.

Key Takeaways

• Paintings alter appearance as viewers move, shadows blend dynamically.
• Both sides of the work reveal erasures and earliest marks.
• Pieces embody unresolved trauma, reflecting wartime volatility worldwide.
• Artist links visual liminality to Russia‑Ukraine conflict’s incinerated spaces.
• Art explores extreme violence and radical invention within liminal contexts.

Summary

The video explores a series of paintings that change as the viewer moves, allowing shadows and blurs to intersect across the front and back surfaces. The artist emphasizes that the work’s dual sides expose early marks and erasures, creating a palpable vulnerability absent from traditional canvas.

Key insights include the dynamic interaction of light and shadow, the absence of narrative resolution, and the metaphorical link to the ongoing Russia‑Ukraine war, which the artist describes as an "incinerated space" processing collective trauma. The pieces capture a liminal zone where extreme violence coexists with radical invention.

The artist notes, "There isn’t this aspect of something being resolved; it feels as if something has occurred and is captured." This quote underscores the intentional unfinished quality, while the reference to the war anchors the work in contemporary geopolitical unrest.

Implications are twofold: the installations challenge viewers to confront shifting realities rather than static images, and they position contemporary art as a conduit for processing societal volatility, urging audiences to engage with conflict‑driven liminality.

Original Description

Julie Mehretu’s and Nairy Baghramian’s TRANSpaintings / Upright Brackets don’t ask you to look at them. They ask you to move. Stretched on translucent monofilament and built from layers of ink and acrylic over ghost images of geopolitical events, they exist in multiple dimensions. You can see the beginning of a painting and its end simultaneously. Your movement and your shifting shadows blur and blend into the lines already there. Both the earliest gestures as well as the erasures. All of it exposed yet frozen in this very moment. Mehretu speaks to the vulnerability of this body of work, which is on view at @mariangoodmangallery in New York. Closing this week.

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

Apr 14–Jun 6, 2026

Marian Goodman

New York 🇺🇸