131. JULIE
MEHRETU
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Stadia I
2004 Ink and acrylic on canvas (274.3 x 365.8 cm) |
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2013 Graphite and acrylic on linen (243.8 x 365.8 cm) |
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Untitled
2001 Ink and acrylic on canvas
(152.4 x 213.36 cm)
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BIO & STEPS
Born:
In 1970 in Adis Abeba,
Ethiopía.
Nowadays:
Lives and works in NY
Studies:
1997 MFA, Honors, Rhode Island School of Design
1992 BA
Kalamazoo College
1990-1991 University
Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal
Themes and style:
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a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian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 canvases,
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.
Techniques:
Paintings
and drawings
Exhibitions
She has exhibited in several important group
exhibitions including ‘Poetic Justice’, 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Whitney
Biennial; São Paolo Biennial and Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004); the
Biennale of Sydney and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Prospect 1,
New Orleans (2008); ‘Automatic Cities’ MCA San Diego (2009); ‘From Picasso to
Julie Mehretu’, British Museum, London (2010) and Document XIII, Kassel (2012).
Solo exhibitions include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; REDCAT, Los Angeles
and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003); St Louis Art Museum (2005) and
MUSAC, Léon, Spain (2006); ‘City Sitings’, Detroit Institute of Art and ‘Black
City’ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2007); North Carolina
Museum of Art, Raleigh, (2008); ‘Grey Area’, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009)
and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). In 2015 she was honoured
with the US State Department's 'National Medal of Arts'.
See all at:
Representative
Galleries:
White Cube
In
her own words:
“I
don’t look at the paintings necessarily as critique. In fact, I’m not so
interested in being critical. What I’m interested in, in painting at least, is
our current situation, whether it be political, historical or social, and how
it informs me and my context and my past. I am trying to locate myself and my
perspective within and between all of it. I know I keep on going back to that,
but it’s like, here’s a war and here’s the way that we’re treating the war, and
how we’re experiencing the war.”
For
more Information: