Six Bardos: Transmutation

Mehretu began this series after a trip to China, and the titles both refer to the stages of the soul between death and reincarnation, and the Bardos of yoga. The individual titles of each artwork in the series refer to the six levels of transitional states between death and rebirth, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Various marks and shapes collide to suggest calligraphy, automatic writing, political graffiti, gestural abstraction and abstract expressionism, cave paintings, and emergent figures.