Mehretu has travelled far – Addis Ababa born but now New York based. Urban imagery has inspired her paintings, “story maps of no location”. Some find her abstract expressionist style frenzied, a criticism also directed at Jackson Pollock. He insisted his works were planned and a reviewer of Mehretu’s show likewise finds structure in her work, describing it as “impressive and authentic”.
Half way through an anthropology doctorate, Hiller fled its “factuality” for “irrational, mysterious, numinous” art. Some suggest she believed in aliens. Not quite; she was fascinated by “the fact that people believed they were abducted by aliens.” In one work Hiller played back hundreds of such accounts, together, through tiny ceiling speakers – not facts but “a different kind of truth”.
The puzzling non-appearance of Leonardo’s restored Salvator Mundi in its new Abu Dhabi home puts a spotlight on art restoration. Some old paintings have had a hard life and cleaning reveals that some of what is seen is not by the artist. Watching a painstaking restoration, sometimes now public, is “a new kind of art pleasure … [and] always tasty meat for the pigmented naysayer.”