Julie Mehretu
Press Information
We are pleased to announce the opening of Julie Mehretu’s first solo exhibition in Germany. For the first time, the artist will be showing,
in one room at the same time, paintings, drawings, and a large-format wall drawing executed on site.
Julie Mehretu’s works are highly emotional and simultaneously analytical commentaries on the state of the world at the beginning of the 21st
century. Her fascinating, complex pictorial language works with set
pieces from graffiti, comics, and tattoos, with architectural drawings, floorplans of airports, and maps of cities. What emerge are multilayered pictorial worlds where historical and fictional landscapes collide and often seem to discharge explosively. “I am interested in the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity.”
In her new series, “drawings (imperial constructions)”, she relinquishes the first time the use of prefabricated elements in favour of a free gesture that is intensified in the large-format wall drawing. By staging various media and formats, the artist intensifies the energetic states and distances inherent in the individual works.
Julie Mehretu currently lives and works in New York. She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and studied in Providence, Rhode Island and Dakar, Senegal. Since 1995, Mehretu’s works have been shown in numerous national and international group exhibitions in renowned institutions, for example the P.S.1. Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2000), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002), and – in the exhibition “Painting an edge of the world” (2001) – the Walker Art Center, Michigan. In 2002, she became the Walker Visual Arts artist-in-residence. The exhibition “Drawing into Painting”, in the same institution, was her first solo exhibition in an American museum (2003). Julie Mehretu was a
participant at the Istanbul Biennial 2003 and has been invited to the Whitney Biennial 2004.
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