LAKE WORTH, FLORIDA.- Twelve large-scale paintings by New York-based artist Julie Mehretu and several new sculptural works by Palm Beach artist Sinisa Kukec are featured in solo exhibitions at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art through November 9.

Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting is organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and curated by Douglas Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi. Mehretu’s biography reads like an atlas. She was born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, and now lives in New York. It is no surprise that her work incorporates the dynamic visual vocabulary of maps, urban-planning grids, and architectural forms. Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate semi-abstractions.

Her work examines the intersection of structures and planes while depicting socially charged public spaces such as government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and international airports. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line, and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she is interested in "the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." Achieving an effect of compositional maelstrom, Mehretu’s paintings blur the line between figuration and abstraction while constantly referencing the world around us - a perfect metaphor for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the 21st century.

Concurrently, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present the first museum exhibition of Sinisa Kukec, a Croatian born Canadian artist whose work bridges the boundary between sculpture and ceramic craft while incorporating new media elements. "His recent pieces, fashioned from porcelain and platinum, are sensual and poetic abstractions," describes Michael Rush, PBICA director and organizer of the exhibition. "The works echo the tactile pleasures of an early Jeff Koons and a recent Anish Kapoor."

Kukec was educated at the University of Manitoba and received his MFA from Alfred University in 2001. He resides in Palm Beach, and will lead a sculpture course for the museum this Fall that is offered in collaboration with the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach.

Both Mehretu and Kukec will make appearances at PBICA during the period of their solo exhibitions for discussions about their work on view.