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Julie Mehretu at The Project - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 2002 by Susan Harris
Julie Mehretu's first one-person show in New York was a graphic tour de force. Comprising four paintings plus 12 drawings which the artist refers to as "footnotes," the exhibition revealed Mehretu's ambitious approach to imagemaking as well as her complex cosmic schema--features that New York viewers had previously glimpsed in group shows at Exit Art, the Drawing Center, P.S. 1 and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
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Mehretu has developed an idiosyncratic system of dots, dashes, arrows, circles, crosses, squares, curlicues and organic shapes which she repeats in dense, built-up passages suggesting fragments of a large, albeit ambiguous, narrative. Her signs are expressively charged, much as van Gogh's abstract marks carry personal emotion even as they coalesce into representation. Mehretu's frenetic forms swirl, float and march as they burst through numerous spatial envelopes--overlaying, underlying and intersecting crisp, delicately drawn lines. Bands, parallelograms and arcs of color torque the picture space and bring the multiplanar activity up to the surface. Her works are epic dramas, as lyrical as they are combustible, that deconstruct conventional notions of space and time.
Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, the big labyrinthian painting one encountered upon entering the gallery, combines perspectival renderings of stadiums, airports, city buildings, grand stairways and colonnaded passageways, all embedded in a surface composed of translucent layers of sprayed acrylic. Receding in space and dissolving like memories over time, finely drawn rules function as a foundation for a turbulent cacophony of organic lines, cartoonlike explosions and boomerangs of color that pervade the canvas. Similarly, in Rise of the New Suprematists, crisply drawn, open forms of buildings and public spaces are overtaken by bright conflagrations rendered in sinuous swirls and gnarled orbs of ink.
In these paintings, as in others like Enclosed Resurgence, Mehretu's apocalyptic vision has a dreamy Blakean quality achieved through a virtuoso handling of traditional mediums. As creator of a world in a perpetual state of becoming and disintegrating, Mehretu, like peers Matthew RJtchie, Kevin Appel and Sarah Sze, effectively maps out a model of contemporary existence that is at once universal and personal.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
