MINNEAPLIS, MINNESOTA.- The Walker Art Center presents today Julie Mehretu, on view through August 3, 2003. New York-based painter Julie Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate semi-abstractions. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she explains: "I am interested in the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." The underlying structure of Mehretu’s work depicts socially charged public spaces-government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and international airports-drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these decontextualized, highly controlled spaces through the layering of personal markings. Encased in coats of accumulated resin, these precisely rendered idioms are drawn from an artificial, abstract cosmology. Mehretu achieves an effect of compositional maelstrom, as elements advance and recede within the graphically complex, ambiguously architectural spaces. Her solo exhibition at the Walker concludes a yearlong artist residency.
Mehretu’s work has been included in Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2000), and she has participated in group exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000); Exit Art, New York (1999); the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1999); and Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina (1999). Most recently, she appeared in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001).
The exhibition was curated by Douglas Fogle.