‘I’m Not Trying to Spell Out a Story’: Watch How Artist Julie Mehretu Uses Massive Scale and Complex Layers to Create Paintings You Get Lost In

by admin

Oct 31, 2019

artnet

The Ethiopian-born artist
Julie
Mehretu has been
known to create works so large and so ambitious that she must rent
out gargantuan spaces just to contain them while she
works.

When she was preparing her massive
diptych unveiled in the lobby of the San Francisco Museum
of Art in 2017, she set up a makeshift studio in a Gothic-style
church in Harlem—the only space with ceilings tall enough to
contain it. And back when she was developing a commission for
Goldman Sachs in 2009, a 21-by-85-foot-long mural, she rented out a
temporary Berlin-based studio to complete the job.

That’s when she conducted an exclusive interview with Art21, in which she
explains that her abstract-seeming compositions in fact contain
embedded references to architecture and map-making. With the help
of her assistants,
Mehretu creates diagrammatic compositions that are rooted in data
ranging from weather systems to architecture to topography—and are
plotted from various points of perspective so that the resulting
image doesn’t conform to any structure in
particular.

“My earlier drawings and
paintings had this map-like element to them,” she explains in the
video, which was filmed as part of the Art in the Twenty-First
Century series on PBS. As her practice evolved, though, she says
she “refrained from trying to explain what’s going on… I’m not
trying to spell out a story.” Instead, she wanted viewers to have a
more visceral reaction to the works, which she constructed by
applying layers upon layers of shapes and lines precisely to the
surface.

At a certain point, Mehretu
began to experiment with sanding down some of the layers, resulting
in what she calls “the erasure becoming the action.” That poetic
gesture reminded her of Buddhas that were once positioned in caves
all around Afghanistan, until the Taliban removed all of them. “The
image of their absence…it felt to me to suggest a moment in terms
of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political
environment.”

On November 3, the
Los Angeles County Museum
of Art will open the
largest and most comprehensive show of Mehretu’s work to date,
tracing the arc of her career. The show brings together some 40
works on paper with 35 paintings, spanning 1996 to the present.
After its presentation in California, the exhibition will travel to
the Whitney Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta,
and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Watch the video, which
originally appeared as part of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century
series, below. “Julie Mehretu”
is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from November 3,
2019–March 22, 2020.

This is an installment of
“Art on Video,” a collaboration between artnet News and Art21 that
brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the
nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century
is available now on PBS. Catch
all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational
programs at Art21.org.