About a year ago, on a casual visit to the Walker Art Center, I noticed a new addition to the permanent collection on display, a small painting by Julie Mehretu. I knew nothing about this artist but was enthralled by the picture: it looked like a miniature apocalypse crammed with battalions of minute soldiers, swabs of moody color, and little cloudbursts irrigating the whole thing with up- and down-drafts. Although modest in size, the thing breathed enormity. The painting seemed figurative but was, in fact, completely abstract.
A retrospective of Mehretu's paintings and graphic work between 2000 and the present is now on display at the Walker Art Center. It's a large show, occupying four galleries with a couple alcoves also devoted to film showing the artist at work. (Mehretu also served a residency with magnet schools in Somali, Sudanese and Ethiopian immigrant communities: this resulted in a work jointly made with the students called "Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities".) Mehretu's work remains astonishing to me and her large canvases, some of them about 25 x 15 feet in dimension, are remarkable works.
Although her paintings (and prints) have evolved, they all display the same fundamental structure. The pictures are layered or palimpsest in design. Generally, she uses four strata -- under the colorful or agitated surface, there is usually a complex of architectural drawings, very neatly and mechanical inscribed in fine black lines; superimposed on the architectural drawings are armies of dots and dashes, hatchmark battalions comprised of very small marks, most of them about a quarter-inch in size. The outer layers of the painting consist of bold, calligraphically inscribed curves and arches, spiraling arcs and, sometimes, stenciled stars or little vortices that look like miniature tempests or waterfalls. Finally, big wedges of color, sometimes a couple feet long or wide are airbrushed onto the surface. Except for the fourth layer, the other strata are all transparent and so coexist above or behind one another, depending upon how the viewer perceives these figures. The surfaces of the paintings are generally strangely industrial. Apparently, each layer of imagery is fixed in an acrylic glaze that is, then, sanded or abraded to provide transparency and, apparent, depth of field. The result is that the pictures look slick and somewhat glassy. (Mehretu's prints, both lithographs and engravings, have a more matted, papery surface -- with some exceptions I don't think her technique works as well in graphic form; she has also made water-colors that aren't particularly distinctive -- they look a bit like floating diaphanous mobs of color, somewhat like paintings by Philip Guston in his Abstract Expressionist phase.)
I like best Mehretu's early work although most of the pictures in the retrospective are very good. The stratum involving calligraphic arcs and spirals interspersed with malign-looking little gales or curly marks show a very fine facture -- much like Saul Steinberg's elegant cartoons that exploit calligraphic effects of curving lines that cast shadows or vary in thickness and density. (Some of her paintings have passages that look like very elegantly drawn abstract cartoons.) The initial paintings in the show are primarily untitled (or named elliptically) and the substrate of architectural drawing consists of window frames and precisely and mechanically drawn steps shown in careful perspective. (You don't see the architectural drawing until after your eye has penetrated the surface paint and marks.) In these pictures, the little hatchmarks are arranged in military formations and one seems to be peering down onto a battlefield from an aerial perspective. The paintings on display show a middle period in which Mehretu enters a sort of world-historical phase. Many of her pictures from around 2010 show stadiums apparently populated by thousands of dots and dashes that read as agitated spectators. The colors of national flags are indicated schematically around the edges of the stadia; stormy weather in the form of little gusts of turbulence seems to spurt up out of the densely patterned surfaces. Four of these paintings are part of a series called Mogamma, an Ethiopian word for "public buildings" and Mehretu seems to have taken as her subject the uprisings that comprised the so-called Arab Spring. A number of her pictures relate to the war in Syria, although very indirectly. In her middle phase, the architectural drawings are more visible and the pictures have a more figurative aspect. The strength of her palimpsest style is that Mehretu can vary the emphasis -- sometimes focusing on the surface of abstract patches of color, sometimes emphasizing the little marks and vortices, sometimes, featuring as predominant the calligraphic swoops and emblems.
Beginning around 2016, Mehretu appropriates imagery from journalism, blurs it very heavily with digital technology and substitutes those highly stylized images for the architectural drawing. This is painting a la mode -- to assert political relevance, Mehretu uses images from the demonstrations at Ferguson, Missouri(BLM content) or pictures of desolate-looking immigration detention centers. This substrate is so intensely manipulated that the source imagery is completely illegible -- it simply supplies a sort of out-of-focus grid to the other marks swarming the paintings. To my mind, this is purely opportunistic -- Mehretu wants to claim a contemporary significance to her pictures; for instance, she claims a patch of fuchsia paint represents tear gas -- but this isn't organic to the image and wouldn't be interpreted in this fashion by someone not reading the explanatory wall label. But she also doesn't want this significance to intervene between the picture and its viewers and so the source images are a matter for politically correct, and hectoring, labels next to the canvases that really have nothing to do with what we see. (I find this condescending or patronizing and obviously insincere). The pictures post-2016 are brightly colored and, therefore, quite decorative -- Mehretu is a sensitive colorist -- but the paintings aren't as radical and distinctive as her earlier work and look a bit like late De Kooning or the "Cold Mountain" series by Bruce Marden. (Mehretu calls some of the big swaths of color "characters" -- in this respect, her paintings contain inhabitants that look a little like the "personages" who appear in Miro and Arshile Gorky.)
In her best paintings, Mehretu evinces an aesthetic of repletion -- like a Baroque Tiepolo mural, you can't quite see everything going on in these pictures no matter how hard you look. Videos demystify her Atelier -- she uses a computer to design the paintings on a big screen and, then, the actual work (at least in the last decade) is executed by a small army of technicians. She says that "lots of small marks have power." The mechanical drawings of architecture are laid onto the picture by use of projections that are traced by her assistants.
Mehretu exemplifies the "man without a country" characteristics of much modern art. Born in Addis Ababa, she seems to have been raised in NewYork and on the West Coast -- she speaks flawless idiomatic English and is secular. (Pictures show her proudly bareheaded at the center of smiling groups of women wearing head-shawls.) WAC wall labels claim, with her endorsement, that her pictures are about the "patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and imperialism". This is ridiculous. Her most recent work is a huge mural executed for Goldman-Sachs, the investment bankers. (So much for her anti-capitalist esthetics.)
This is an excellent show and I recommend it highly. (January and February will be good months to visit the Walker Art Center. Also on display is a large show of recent pictures by David Hockney. When I looked at Mehretu's work, my eye was exhausted by her big canvases and so I didn't dare to venture into the Hockney show which would have required a massive shift in perspective. I hope to see that show sometime in the next month.)
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