NYAB Event - Julie Mehretu "Gray Area"

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At Guggenheim Museum
Media: Painting

The term “gray area” speaks to a condition of indeterminacy, a liminal state in which something is not clearly defined or perhaps impossible to define. Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) adapts such an enigmatic circumstance as a tool to engage the viewer in her complex compositions of meticulously drawn mechanical renderings, spontaneous gestural markings, and colorful interjections. The images seem to exist at a horizon where the work could either plunge into dense obscurity or nearly disappear into an ethereal cloud of dust. Yet a remarkable sense of pictorial space always exists in Mehretu’s paintings, created not just by their layering but also by the contrasts inherent in them. What appears abstract from afar is replete with detailed drawing when viewed up close. And just as one is able to glean some bit of information in order to identify a rendering, it vaporizes into an indefinability that compels the viewer to look again and again.

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