Julie Mehretu

Published to coincide with her solo exhibition, ‘SEXTANT’, at White Cube Mason’s Yard (21 September – 3 November 2018), this unique artist’s book marks a key moment in Julie Mehretu’s practice.

Taking the immediacy of a news photograph as a starting point, including the voracious wild fires of California, the violent white supremacy rally and counter rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and the Grenfell Tower fire in London, Mehretu creates the ground on which her subsequent complex show more configuration of graphic mark-making resolves. Reproduced alongside the paintings and accompanying source images are photographs of the artist at work as well as lyrical and personal reflections on individual pieces by the Egyptian born, nomadic artist Anna Boghiguian.

The publication includes Japanese folds and different paper stocks to reflect the varied types of images brought together by the artist, as well as a special insert of her accompanying graphic works.

Featuring large-scale paintings and etchings, the exhibition highlights Mehretu’s use of gestural abstraction as a conduit for evocative and charged emotion and intellectual enquiry.

Glenn Ligon has described the artist’s work as ‘traversed by history [...] grounded in urgent political and social questions while simultaneously troubling the limits of abstract painting.’[1] In these new paintings, which continue from the ‘Conjured Parts’ series begun in 2015, Mehretu employs a broad spectrum palette to create powerful, animated, complex canvases. Marking a continued departure from her earlier work which focused on a layered language of mapping and architectural detail, these paintings take the immediacy of a news photograph as their starting point. These include images of such recent pivotal junctures as the rallies of independence in Catalonia; the voracious wild fires of California; the violent white supremacy rally and counter rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the instantaneous outbreak of Muslim ban protests throughout the United States; and the Grenfell Tower fire in London. show less