ART TALK: In A Thrilling Retrospective, Ethiopian-American Artist Julie Mehretu Maps A Radical New Path For Geopolitics

"The extraordinary vitality of these works is achieved by Mehretu’s artistic talent for abstraction, through which she channels her interests in political forces including globalism and migration. (The latter is tinged with personal experience. Her family fled political instability in Ethiopia, moving from Addis Ababa to East Lansing, Michigan, when the artist was a child.)- Forbes. (© Julie Mehretu)

Forbes

In A Thrilling Whitney Retrospective, Ethiopian-American Artist Julie Mehretu Maps A Radical New Path For Geopolitics

Before the world was home to Africans, Asians, Europeans, Australians, and North and South Americans, all lands were massed in a single supercontinent called Pangaea. And before Pangaea, the landmasses were conjoined to make the supercontinent of Gondwana. At the time, some five hundred million years ago, there were no humans, and the dinosaurs that were alive to watch the tectonic shifts leading to Gondwana’s breakup – a multi-million-year process – left no record of what they witnessed. Geologists have only recently mapped Gondwana by simulating plate tectonics in reverse. The artist Julie Mehretu has also charted Gondwana. Her version takes the form of a mural-scale painting currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a highlight of her impressive mid-career retrospective.

Mehretu is best known for paintings that have the superficial appearance of cartography yet are deeply disorienting. Since the 1990s, she has combined rigorous systems of geometry with symbols of her own imagination, often highly gestural, which articulate specific spatial relationships between unknown reference points. Titles such as Black City and Back to Gondwanaland sometimes hint at a subject being mapped or explored, but any modicum of certainty is undermined by other titles applied to similar canvases, such as Mumbo Jumbo.


Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation, 2001. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 101 ½ × 208 ½ inches (257.81 × 529.59 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas 2013.28. © Julie Mehretu

The extraordinary vitality of these works is achieved by Mehretu’s artistic talent for abstraction, through which she channels her interests in political forces including globalism and migration. (The latter is tinged with personal experience. Her family fled political instability in Ethiopia, moving from Addis Ababa to East Lansing, Michigan, when the artist was a child.) Mehretu has creatively embraced the tension between abstract tradition and political engagement by evoking the ambiguous ways in which geopolitics maps onto the intercontinental landscape.

One of the most extreme instances of this technique can be seen in a mural she created for Goldman Sachs in 2009. Mehretu intended Mural to represent “a spatial history of global capitalism”, an ambition she set out to achieve by layering abstractions of global trade routes, historical stock exchange architecture, and corporate logos. The result is unintelligible in the sense of being irreducible, and thereby evocative of the irreducible complexity of the marketplace. Capitalism is depicted as a self-perpetuating system that repels reform through its inconceivable internal logic.

Taking a commission from Goldman Sachs to create this painting may be viewed as cynical opportunism – a shrewd way to make a buck on the wages of sin – or more charitably can be seen as a gesture of optimism: Situating the mural in the lobby of one of the world’s most powerful investment banking firms, where financiers would see it daily, might provide just the kind of unmooring required to awaken the need to reorient global wealth distribution.

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Related:

ART TALK: Julie Mehretu – A Decade of Printmaking at Gemini G.E.L. in NYC

Watch: Checkerboard Film Foundation presents “Julie Mehretu: Mid-Career Survey”

ART TALK: Julie Mehretu Makes Art Big Enough to Get Lost In

Julie Mehretu’s Mid-Career Survey at LA County Museum of Art

Julie Mehretu’s Mid-Career Survey To Open at LACMA

Julie Mehretu at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), November 3, 2019 – March 22, 2020 (Level 1) and May 17, 2020 (Level 3)

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