Julie Mehretu at the Whitney
Monumental Immersive Paintings
It is your last chance to catch the fascinating Julie Mehretu exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show, which opened in March and consists of a comprehensive survey of Merhretu’s career, closes on August 8, 2021.
It is one of those exhibitions you can’t stop thinking about for days after visiting it. So much thought and detail go into each large-scale painting that it is unbelievable a single mastermind is behind them all. It consists of a midcareer survey uniting more than seventy paintings and works on paper created between 1996 and today. Mehretu’s immense and dramatic panoramic paintings take up the entire fifth-floor gallery, each packed with a vast amount of information and references to different cultures and events in history. Themes explored in this diverse collection include colonialism, capitalism, global uprising, and displacement through the artistic strategies of abstraction, landscape, and, most recently, figuration. In addition, the artist often draws inspiration from modern-day cities. As a result, some of the themes represented will feel close to home for many Americans (especially her most recent works that explore more current events using digitally blurred, rotated, and cropped photographs as base layers and then marking over them).
Julie Mehretu is a genius. She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970 and New York City-based since 1999. Through her innovative work, the artist has created a new visual language, and one could study one of her paintings for an entire hour and still not grasp every fascinating detail. Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney, is not wrong in stating that “few artistic encounters are more thrilling than standing close to one of Julie Mehretu’s monumental canvases, enveloped in its fullness, color, forms, and symbolic content. Mehretu’s conviction and mastery of composition and brushwork—along with the sheer energy and full-on commitment of her execution—endow her works with a life force, presence, and presentness.” He has also said, “the Whitney Museum is particularly pleased to co-organize this mid-career survey with LACMA, and we are thrilled to continue our longstanding and close relationship with the artist, who has been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Whitney, beginning with the 2004 Biennial.”
Rujeko Hockley, an assistant curator at the Whitney, has described her work exceptionally well: “in their resistance to a single interpretation, Mehretu’s paintings encourage a nuanced reckoning with the true complexity of our politics, histories, and identities,” He adds that “she often uses art as a means to frame social uprisings, including the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, as well as specific events like the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; wildfires in California; and the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar. Without being overly literal, Mehretu’s work gives visual form to both the past and current moment. At its core, her art is invested in our lived experiences, examining how forces such as migration, capitalism, and climate change impact human populations—and possibilities. We look forward to bringing her brilliant explorations to Whitney audiences.” The exhibition also includes a film of Mehretu’s process by artist Tacita Dean, in which one can truly appreciate the amount of work and dedication that goes into each creation.
A visit to the Whitney is always enjoyable, but this exhibition will make the trip to the museum well worth it. It is the first-ever comprehensive survey of Mehretu’s career, organized by Christine Y. Kim, curator of contemporary art at LACMA, with Rujeko Hockley, an assistant curator at the Whitney. Hockley oversees the installation at the Whitney. Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Julie Mehretu is on display at the Whitney until August 8.
