Julie Mehretu “Liminal Squared”
Marian Goodman Gallery
This event has ended.
A series of new paintings will be on view as well as a suite of five new etchings. The works were created over the past three years in New York in the aftermath of events of the Arab Spring which were the point of departure for the monumentally scaled MOGAMMA (In Four Parts), 2012, recently presented at Documenta (13), 2012, Kassel. They follow a group exhibition “In Praise of Doubt” at Punta dell Dogana, Venice in 2011; and a recent presentation of her “Mind Breath and Beat” Drawings at our Paris space in January-March 2013.
Julie Mehretu’s paintings are structured through layers of clear acrylic, architectural tracings, drawing, ink, graphite, erasure and mark-making. The works are built up in stages with additive elements generating, erasing, or re-inscribing the previous. Culled from archival sources, with architectural structures serving as a foundation for her renderings– from ancient city plans, civic buildings, urban designs, public squares, tombs, palaces, ruins – the paintings combine meticulous graphic drawing with spontaneous gesture. Mehretu begins with the premise of architecture as a medium of social history and power and proceeds to imagine a new present, a fictional topography realized through a formal vocabulary of line, color, gesture, markings, grids, characters, swarms, blurs, washes, which are overlaid and stratified on the surface of the canvas. In exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social, the works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space. “I am interested in ways to picture or map [civilization] … weaving in and out of functioning, resistance, understanding.”1 “I am interested in the potential of ‘psychogeographies’, which suggests that within an invisible and invented creative space the individual can tap a resource of self-determination and resistance. […] This impulse is a major generating force in my drawing and my larger conceptual project as a painter.”
Her meditation on subject matter, whether a spontaneous uprising in a revolutionary square, an algorithm of behavior of the everyday workplace, or post-human culture as it mutates towards the machine, is mirrored in a complex and personal lexicon of painting, a uniquely individual language that ruminates, in a mimetic way, on the swarming, morphing cosmology that is our historical moment, ever persistent in its process of becoming, ever mutating on a precipice of change.
It is in this space of the liminal – literally, threshold – the stage of standing on the verge between one’s previous way of structuring identity, time, or community and a new way— that her new body of work has developed. In the new works, one witnesses the exploration of a new language of abstraction, embracing entropy, resistance, and the imperatives of social agency as they coalesce towards the inchoate nexus of collective history.
Media
Schedule
from May 11, 2013 to June 22, 2013
Reception For The Artist on 2013-05-11 from 18:00 to 20:00