Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu has recently received wide acclaim for her huge canvases and wall drawings, which incorporate layers of dynamic line work. Sources for Mehretu’s vocabulary are wide ranging, and include architectural plans, comics, graffiti, Renaissance engravings, and Eastern calligraphy. This print, which is small relative to her usual scale, conveys immense illusionistic expanse; within this expanse, a drama takes place that belies the “calm” of the title. In a 2003 interview, Mehretu stated:

My initial impulse and investigation was to try and develop, through drawing, a language that could communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having its own character, a modus operandi of social behavior. As they continued to grow and develop in drawing I wanted to see them layered; to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives.

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(“A Conversation with Julie Mehretu,” recorded on the website of the exhibition Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; May 2-December 7, 2003; www.nmafa.si.edu/exhibits/passages/mehretu-conversation.html)