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One of The New York Times Best Art Books of 2019 This full-scale retrospective monograph of Julie Mehretu's work traces the development of one of America's most celebrated abstract painters. Over the past twenty-five years Julie Mehretu has emerged as a major force in American art. Known mostly for her enormous abstract paintings, she also produces exquisite drawings, often created as studies for larger works. This sumptuous volume accompanies a major mid-career survey of Mehretu's work. Designed to allow close viewing of Mehretu's vast canvases, it features lush reproductions of her paintings in their entirety, as well as numerous full-page details. The genesis for much of Mehretu's work li...
Incorporating the dynamic visual vocabulary of maps, urban planning grids, and architectural forms, alternating between historical narratives and fictional landscapes, Julie Mehretu's beautifully layered paintings and drawings combine abstract forms with the familiar, pairing the Roman Coliseum with floor plans from international airports, Le Corbusier's unbuilt megacity with blueprints from Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando, and dashing it all together with a color field full of abstract geometry. What does a city in motion look like? The closest picture of it exists in Mehretu's semiabstractions, their maelstroms of color and line, power, history, globalism and personal narrative frozen, swirled and encased in coats of accumulated resin.
A recent recipient of the highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” Julie Mehretu is an important American artist. With several major solo exhibitions in the last few years, including a traveling exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of the Arts that debuts in fall 2007, Mehretu has captivated her audience with her ambitious large-scale wall installations that include a dizzying array of signs, symbols, and motifs worked into compositions that take as their point of departure architectural renderings and sketches. While known primarily as a painter, it is the artist’s drawings that drive her work; she produces scores of major drawings a year (while her output of p...
Mehretu's first major solo exhibition in London featured new and recent paintings, some of which will be presented within a specially constructed environment designed by David Adjaye in close collaboration with the artist. Described by curator Douglas Fogle as "perfect metaphors for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the 21st century", Mehretu's large-scale paintings, which are built up in layers, employ a broad lexicon of drawing techniques together with a precise, muscular abstraction to investigate the intersection of politics, architecture and history and the way these forces shape the formation of our social identity. Exhibition: White Cube, Bermondsey, UK (2013).
Julie Mehretu Drawings and Monotypes documents her solo exhibition at Kettle's Yard in 2019. For this exhibition, Mehretu made a new installation of richly layered drawings and monotypes, extending her dynamic exploration of the potential of drawing and mark making which are fundamental to her artistic practice. Inspired by current world issues, her personal biography, and the history of abstraction, Mehretu's powerful works interrogate the present with urgency and lyricism. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, and now resident in New York, Julie Mehretu is among the most highly regarded artists working today. A recent painting by the artist, Ghosthymn, was included in the exhibition Actions. The image of the world can be different, which marked the re-opening of Kettle's Yard in 2018.
Mehretu's evocative compositions in conversation with artists and writers of all stripes, imparting the artist's ongoing commitment to collaboration This catalog is published in conjunction with a major exhibition dedicated to the work of American artist Julie Mehretu (born 1970), spotlighting more than 60 paintings, drawings and prints, from the past 25 years--several of which were painted in the last two. Her sensual and emotional compositions are imbued with palimpsestic and inventive marks that emerge from a dense, multilayered and complex set of references: art historical and sociopolitical, geographical, contemporary and personal. Mehretu's practice has also always engaged in various forms of collaboration and sustained conversation with fellow artists. Fittingly, then, this catalog presents Mehretu's work alongside that of the artists and writers Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin.