Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu, “Excerpt (Riot),” 2003, ink and acrylic on canvas, 32 x 54”.

Last night on art:21 there was a segment on Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian painter in New York, who was working on a 10' x 85' long painting too large for any space in New York and so destined for Berlin.  She has a team of assistants who prepare her canvases which were shown as roughly 10' x 10'.  Projections of cities, taken often from GoogleEarth are traced in pencil on the canvas surface, so the photograph becomes a screen of lines, then another image is projected and another series of lines is added. Mehretu directs what aspect of each projection she wants and eventually starts to work into this graph of registrations of a city over time. 

It reminded me much of how architectural drawings used to be made, before CAD, with a team working on a set with layer after layer of information drawn onto the sheet, some pieces erased to make room for others, sometimes simultaneous information held by the same pencil line -- a dense haze of lines and tones by the end.  When I started drafting sometimes it was to update drawings on linen, and it was usual to work on both sides of the sheet. 

Anyway Mehretu starts to work into the basic information traced and drafted onto the acrylic surface of the canvas with ink and paint, sandpaper and hand, adding marks that connect the layers.  In Zaha Hadid's early drawings she did the same kind of isolation of certain planes, pulled out of conventional three-dimensional mapping, stretched to show urban spatiality rather than urban materiality. 

Mehretu's work is very much about mark-making, from the ruled lines, to floating colour patches over the lines, to expressive, agitated hand work like handwriting over it all.  She said at the end of the segment that it was all about making a painting.  The painting is the end point; the painting is not a vehicle for some other kind of message about urban, seething life – it is made by the response to that life.


The best site showing lots of work is at White Cube.

Comments

[nu]

I'm afraid to tell you that she is from Ethiopia...not American!

[stephanie]

yes, you are right. I should have mentioned it. I suppose I was temporarily blinded by the fact that she was profiled in a programme in the American Masters series on PBS. It is always a question, solved individually rather than as a social rule, whether one chooses to identify oneself as one's origins or as one's geographic present. It is important to Mehretu's work to both be Ethiopian and to be known as such. It is perhaps the lingering effects of a particular kind of American modernism that treats origins as irrelevant to critical evaluation.