Blueprints for Another World

Julie Mehretu frequently has been hailed as an heir to Jackson Pollock. But where many of Pollock’s paintings seem divorced from real-world antecedents, Mehretu blends abstraction and representation in open response to current events: the Arab Spring, deadly wildfires on the West Coast of the United States, the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar, the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some of her paintings and works on paper look like warped views of cities from above; others resemble blueprints for another world. Always, though, amid the layers and layers of symbols, shapes, vectors, and lines, one can see Mehretu’s architectural precision and control. An exhibition showcasing more than twenty years of her work will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 25 and run through August 8. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Julie Mehretu, Black City, 2007, ink and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 192″. Pinault Collection, Paris, France. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Untitled 2, 1999, ink and polymer on canvas mounted to board, 59 3/4 × 71 3/4″. Private collection, courtesy of White Cube. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Migration Direction Map (large), 1996, ink on mylar, 22 x 15″. Private collection. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson, 2016, ink and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 96″. The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Mind-Wind Field Drawings (quarantine studio, d.h.) #1, 2019–2020, ink and acrylic on paper, 26 x 40″. Private collection, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4), 2018, ink and acrylic on canvas, 96 × 120″. Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle; gift of George Economou, 2019. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, 2001, ink and acrylic on canvas, 101 1/2 × 208 1/2″. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas 2013.28. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (1 of 4), 2012, ink and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 144″. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. © Julie Mehretu.

“Julie Mehretu” will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 25 and run through August 8.

from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3tFsh0T

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog