Untitled (2005 Drawings), 2005 Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970. She attended the University Cheik Anta Diop Dakar, Senegal before moving to the United States, where she earned a BA from Kalamazoo College in 1992 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Surrounded by political unrest since she was very young, Mehretu is an artist inspired by the chaos and patterns of war. Her work, however, is physically beautiful, full of detail and of great, sweeping space.
Though she is known primarily as a painter, drawing and printmaking are primary activities for her. Her landmark 2003 exhibition at the Walker Art Center was entitled “Drawing into Painting,”as her painting process itself is deeply rooted in drawing, suggesting rapidly expanding spaces through her dynamic use of line.
Untitled (2005 Drawings), 2005 Mehretu’s work is both personal and schematic. Since her days at RISD, she has been accumulating a personal library of semi-abstract symbols that suggest populations, warring factions, or scattered shrapnel. Mehretu also collects architectural and municipal plans, which she breaks down into dysfunctional bits and then traces to create the foundations of a composition.
Over the faint traces of dissembled, skeletal perspectives, she layers curling lines or spatterings of color that suggest the intricacies of her symbols’ interactions. These symbols, in turn, are grouped together in static conglomerations, orderly processions, or bursts of flight.
Untitled (2005 Drawings), 2005 The resulting images are densely packed fields, at once chaotic and tensely planned, that push the boundary between flowchart and landscape. Whether she is drawing, painting, or printmaking, Mehretu tends to work on a large scale, overwhelming the viewer with the scope of her compositions.
When she uses color, it is not to describe depth. Rather, Mehretu chooses the shallow hues of atlases or textbooks to scatter like confetti from explosions or run in tracks out into space. In a graceful role reversal, even in Mehretu’s colored pieces it is her inky black that becomes the expressive element of the work. It collects in swarms, emanates in wisps, and clouds around brighter tones. In the field of architectural echoes where she lets it loose, Mehretu’s black is an element of human reactivity, volatile and erratic.
Local Calm Mehretu was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall award. In 2005, she was awarded both a MacArthur fellowship and the American Art Award from the Whitney Museum. Her paintings are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2004, her work appeared at the Whitney and Sao Paolo Biennials, and she has had solo shows at the Saint Louis Art Museum, at The Project in New York, and at Redcat in Los Angeles, among other venues. She is represented by the Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston, by The Project in New York and Los Angeles, and by Galerie Carlier in Berlin.
—Rachel Lyon
All images courtesy of Julie Mehretu. Photographed by Sarah Rentz.
*Except “Local Calm” published by Crown Point Press.