Julie Mehretu

(Lo que yo pienso) Su trabajo se acerca más al mundo de un caricaturista que desdibuja formas con sus pinceles inventados. Capa tras capa de pintura para luego dibujar sobre un lienzo lleno de colores, como un cartógrafo en busca de otra realidad Julie se mueve por todas las dimensiones conocidas.

Black Ground (deep light)
2006
ink and acrylic on canvas
72 x 96 in. (182.9 x 243.8 cm)

(lo que dicen de ella) Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian Futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of Abstract Expressionist colour field painting. In her highly worked paintings, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography.

Covenant
2006
Ink and Acrylic on Canvas
72 x 96 in. (182.88 x 243.84 cm)
Private collection
Photo: Erma Estwick

(lo que ella dice sobre su trabajo) "I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilisations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place"

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