Produced at a pivotal moment in Julie Mehretu’s career, Aether (Venice) (2011) is a compositional maelstrom of architectural schematics, in which aerial, cross-sectional and isometric views of Venetian churches, palaces and other landmarks are layered into a dense field of visual incident. The monumental canvas was created for François Pinault’s Punta della Dogana, where it was first exhibited during the 2011 Venice Biennale. It was subsequently included in several of the artist’s most significant exhibitions, notably her major touring survey, which debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, before travelling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2019–21). Together with related works from the early 2010s – similarly characterised by the accumulation and superimposition of architectural fragments, and now held in institutional collections including Tate, London; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and The Broad, Los Angeles, California – Aether (Venice) establishes Mehretu as a contemporary master of a reimagined form of history painting.

This edition of White Cube Salon features a newly commissioned text by independent curator Christine Y. Kim, former Britton Family Curator-at-Large of North American Art at Tate Modern, London (2022–26).

Like the two monumental works that bracket it – Mural (2009), a Lower Manhattan commission mapping the trade routes and financial networks of global capitalism, and Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012), a swirling abstraction of Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution – Aether (Venice) layers specific histories, movements and architectures according to an aesthetic logic. Alongside Invisible Line (collective) (2011), Aether (Venice) was included in the ‘Ruin in Revolution’ section of my comprehensive chronology of Mehretu’s oeuvre in the exhibition publication for her mid-career survey co-organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2019–21). From 2009 to 2011, Mehretu was redrawing histories as more spectral, diffuse and fragmented, playing with time and movement, and pushing abstraction to new limits.

For Venice (Aether), Mehretu drew from sources ranging from personal photographs taken from boats and on canal-side walks to prints and drawings dating back to 17th-century Venice, projecting them onto the canvas as a base for line drawings that grow dense and dizzying in some areas, sparse and unfinished in others. She completed the work at the Punta della Dogana, facing the Piazza San Marco, whose centuries of architecture figure prominently in the composition and represent the complexities and contradictions of history.

The Basilica di San Marco speaks in the Byzantine vocabulary of its Greek cross plan, low domes, and mosaic-sheathed interior, modelled on Constantinople’s Church of the Holy Apostles, a fitting choice for an 11th-century Venice that saw itself as Byzantium’s heir. Yet the ogee arches, crocketed pinnacles, and statuary added to its upper façade in the 1300s and 1400s pull it toward the Gothic idiom of its neighbour, the Palazzo Ducale. That building is considered the purest statement of Venetian Gothic precisely because it inverts structural logic, hanging a solid, diamond-patterned marble mass over a lace of pointed arcading rather than stacking mass on mass. The Loggetta del Sansovino, tucked at the base of the Campanile, arrived in the 1530s, dropping Roman classicism – with its rounded arches, paired columns, bronze figures in the manner of antique statuary – into the piazza. Rather than displacing its Byzantine and Gothic neighbours, the Loggetta simply takes its place beside them. Venice, unlike Florence or Rome, rarely demolished older styles; it kept adding layers, much as Mehretu’s palimpsestic abstraction does. The Piazza San Marco reads less as stylistic progression than as an unfinished argument between three centuries, which the painting's upper and lower portions reenact.

There, upside-down porticoes and unfinished colonnades fade away, holding space for indeterminacy, for both unbuilding and future potential. This openness first acknowledges the incoherence of history and the city itself. It also constructs what Mehretu calls a ‘third space’ between architecture and gesture, representation and abstraction, presence and absence. Aether (Venice) holds that relationality as deliberately, productively uncertain. Like a conductor’s baton cueing a decrescendo, it suspends the audience in uncertainty and discovery.