Julie Mehretu
Part history painting, part psychogeographical study, Mehretu’s Untitled 1 proposes a novel encounter with place and space. There is no guiding perspective to its images, no organising system with which to see them. Instead, the artist offers a dynamic pictorial articulation of the urban experience. “On one side is consolidation, on the other is disintegration,” critic Christopher Knight writes of Mehretu’s compositional chaos. “Collapse is underway, coalescence strains. Schism and synthesis spar.” Visual cohesion is fleeting; here, where architectural schema conflates multiple points of view – aerial, cross-section, and isometric. Within these constellations of diagrams, abstract incidents appear as flat geometric forms and calligraphic swirls. Together, the representational and non-objective coincide in a confusion of topography, built environment, and colour.
b.1970, Addis Ababa
“I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language,” Julie Mehretu says. “The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space… By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings, I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history.” In a slow, accumulative process, Mehretu layers successive marks between coats of transparent acrylic, building strata of individual traces layered one upon the other like geological deep time. Her gestural paintings expand outward from an unseen singularity, compressing not only time and space but collapsing art-historical influences – from the dynamism of Futurism to Kandinsky’s abstraction, Suprematism’s geometry and Calder’s spatial silhouettes. Evoking urban plurality and the coincidence of disparate realities, Mehretu pairs line drawings, found photographs and gestural mark-making to frenetic effect. On the artist’s canvas, the political, historical and social coincide in “story maps of no location.”