Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu
Born 1970
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Nationality American
Education East Lansing High School
Alma mater Kalamazoo College,
Rhode Island School of Design
Occupation painter
Awards MacArthur Fellow

Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an artist, best known for her densely layered abstract paintings and prints. She lives and works in New York City. Mehretu shares her New York studio with her partner, the artist Jessica Rankin.[1]

Life and work

Mehretu was born in Ethiopia, in 1970, the first child of an Ethiopian college professor and an American teacher. They fled the country in 1977 and moved to East Lansing, Michigan, for her father’s teaching position at Michigan State University.[2][3] A graduate of East Lansing High School, Mehretu received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and did a junior year abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, then attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997.[4][5] She moved to New York in 1999.[5] Mehretu's mother-in-law is Australian author and poet Lily Brett.

Mehretu is known for her large-scale paintings and drawings and her technique of layering different elements and media.[6] Her paintings are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with different geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings for stadiums, international airports, and other public gathering hubs,[7] seen from different perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric.[8] Her drawings are preparatory to her large paintings, and sometimes interim between paintings.[9]

“ I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilizations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.[10] ”

Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts (2012), the collective name for four monumental canvases that were included in documenta 13, relates to 'Al-Mogamma', the name of the all purpose government building in Tahrir Square, Cairo which was both instrumental in the 2011 revolution and architecturally symptomatic of Egypt's post-colonial past. The word 'Mogamma', however, means 'collective' in Arabic and historically, has been used to refer to a place that shares a mosque, a synagogue and a church and is a place of multi faith.[11] A later work, The Round City, Hatshepsut (2013) contains architectural traces of Baghdad itself – its title referring to the historical name given to the city in ancient maps. Another painting, Insile (2013) built up from a photo image of Believers' Palace amid civilian buildings, activates its surface with painterly ink gestures, blurring and effacing the ruins beneath.[12]

While best known for large-scale abstract paintings, Mehretu has experimented with prints since graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was enrolled in the painting and printmaking program in the mid-1990s. Her exploration of printmaking began with etching. She has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across America, among them Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Crown Point Press in San Francisco, Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, and Derrière L’Etoile Studios and Burnet Editions in New York City.[13]

Mehretu was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1997–98) and the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001).[14] In 2003, the artist worked with thirty high school girls from East Africa in 2003 during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 2007, she led a monthlong residency program with 40 art students from Detroit public high schools.[2] In the spring of 2007 she was the Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.[6]

Exhibitions

In 2001, Mehretu participated in the exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World at the Walker Art Center. She later was one of 38 artists whose work was exhibited in the 2004-5 Carnegie International: A Final Look.[15] She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000). Her work has appeared in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London (2001); White Cube gallery in London (2002),[16] the Busan Biennale in Korea (2002); the 8th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania (2002); and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mehretu's work was also included in the "In Praise of Doubt" exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in the summer of 2011 as well as dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012. In 2014, she participated in 'The Divine Comedy. Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists' curated by Simon Njami,

Collections

Mehretu's works are held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.[17] Although located in a private office building lobby, her 23' x 80' mural commissioned for the new Goldman Sachs tower in New York City (2010) is viewable from the sidewalk windows.[18]

Recognition

In 2000, Mehretu was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award.[19] On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."[20]

In 2007, while completing a residency at the American Academy in Berlin, Julie Mehretu received the 15th commission of the Deutsche Bank and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The body of work she created, Grey Area, was composed of six large-scale paintings, completed between 2007 and 2009 in a studio in Berlin.[21]

Art market

Mehretu's painting Untitled 1 sold for $1.02 million at Sotheby's in September 2010.[22] Its estimated value had been $600–$800,000.[23] At Art Basel in 2014, White Cube sold Mehretu’s Mumbo Jumbo (2008) for $5 million.[24]

Mehretu is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and by White Cube in London[25] as well as by carlier | gebauer in Berlin.[26]

In 2010, Mehretu's work was the object of the Lehmann v. The Project Worldwide case before the New York Supreme Court.[1] The case involved legal issues over her work and the right of first refusal contracts between her then-gallery and a collector.[27] In return for a $75,000 loan by the collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann to the Project Gallery, made in February 2001, the gallery was to give Lehmann a right of first refusal on any work by any artist the gallery represented, and at a 30 per cent discount until the loan was repaid. According to Lehmann, the loan was primarily designed to buy access to works by Mehretu. However, the agreement between Lehmann and The Project expressly provided that four other individuals also have the right of first choice to any work by any artist represented by the gallery. The gallery sold 40 works by Mehretu during the period of the contract, and only one was offered first to Lehmann. Lehmann suspected that his agreement was not being honoured after seeing several large paintings by Mehretu belonging to other collectors in an exhibition at the Walker Art Center and sued for breach of contract.[28] The case, eventually won by the collector, revealed to a wider public precisely what prices and discounts galleries offer various collectors and galleries on paintings by Mehretu - information normally concealed by the art world. It also was the first case to try to enforce the right to buy contemporary art.

Selected solo exhibitions

ing into Painting, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA

References

  1. 1 2 Mason, Christopher (February 28, 2005), "She Can't Be Bought", New York Magazine, retrieved 2008-03-10
  2. 1 2 Hilarie M. Sheets (November 11, 2007), Industrial Strength in the Motor City New York Times.
  3. ↑ Calvin Tomkins (March 29, 2010), Big Art, Big Money: Julie Mehretu’s “Mural” for Goldman Sachs The New Yorker.
  4. ↑ "White Cube (via Archive.org)". May 18, 2008. Archived from the original on May 18, 2008.
  5. 1 2 Tomkins, Calvin (March 29, 2010), "Big Art, Big Money: Julie Mehretu's "Mural" for Goldman Sachs", The New Yorker
  6. 1 2 Fellow: Julie Mehretu American Academy in Berlin, Berlin.
  7. ↑ Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
  8. ↑ Julie Mehretu White Cube, London.
  9. ↑ Julie Mehretu — New Drawings, February 1 – March 16, 2008 Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University.
  10. ↑ Laurie Firstenberg, "Painting Platform in NY", Flash Art Vol. XXXV No. 227, November | December 2002, p. 70
  11. ↑ Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared, 1 May – 7 July 2013 White Cube, London.
  12. ↑ Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared, May 11 - June 22, 2013 Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
  13. ↑ The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents the exhibition "Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu," April 13 - June 17, 2012 Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie.
  14. ↑ Julie Mehretu PBS Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 5 (2009), Systems.
  15. ↑ http://www.cmoa.org/info/npress71.asp
  16. ↑ "White Cube — Renegade Delirium". Archived from the original on February 11, 2007.
  17. ↑ "MoMa online catalog". Moma.org. Retrieved 2013-12-05.
  18. ↑ Calvin Tomkins (March 29, 2010), Big Art, Big Money, The New Yorker, retrieved 2010-06-15
  19. ↑ pennymccallfoundation.org
  20. ↑ Houston Chronicle http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/art/3375771
  21. ↑ Buhmann, Stephanie (Jul–Aug 2010). "Julie Mehretu Grey Area". The Brooklyn Rail.
  22. ↑ "Lehman's art firesale fetches $12m - Just In - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)". Abc.net.au. 2010-09-26. Retrieved 2013-12-05.
  23. ↑ "» AO Auction Preview: Two years after declaring bankruptcy Lehman Brothers hopes to sell hundred of artworks worth millions at 3 auctions in UK & US - AO Art Observed™". Artobserved.com. 2010-08-20. Retrieved 2013-12-05.
  24. ↑ Georgina Adam (June 20, 2014), Brisk business at the Basel fair Financial Times
  25. ↑ White Cube
  26. ↑ "carlier gebauer". carlier gebauer. 2013-10-30. Retrieved 2013-12-05.
  27. ↑ João Ribas (November 8, 2005), Julie Mehretu, ARTINFO, retrieved 2008-04-22
  28. ↑ Colin Gleadell (January 31, 2005), Contemporary market: Julie Mehretu The Daily Telegraph.

External links

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