Julie Mehretu

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julie Mehretu (* 1970 in Addis Ababa ) is an American painter .

Life

Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia , the first child of an Ethiopian college professor and an American teacher . She fled the country in 1977 and moved to East Lansing , Michigan because of her father's teaching at Michigan State University . In 1992 she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kalamazoo College, Michigan. After a year abroad at the University Cheik Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal , she attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence , which she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1997. In 2017 she was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Julie Mehretu has lived and worked in New York City since 1999 ; she shares her studio with her partner Jessica Rankin .

plant

The main element and starting point of her large-format and highly complex paintings are architectural and urbanistic plans that indicate diverse types of movement: flight routes, airports, wind and water currents, highways, subways or telephone networks.

The artist combines painting and drawing in her work; she speaks of "drawing into painting" herself. Overall, the paintings made of multi-layered synthetic resin layers appear abstract, while narrative elements become legible in detail. Mehretu uses small-scale symbols from the consumer world: advertising graphics and company logos, but also graffiti , tattoos and comics .

Mehretu's brushwork is partly reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy . However, formal connections can also be drawn to the work of Wassily Kandinsky or Kasimir Malevich .

Migration and war, the autobiographical and the visionary form the basis for your suggestive imagery, which can be read as metaphors of globalized socio-political conditions at the beginning of the 21st century.

Works (selection)

  • 2005: Black City (Black City)
  • 2005: Happy Weather . The work, consisting of three graphic sheets (Local Calm / Local Calm; Diffraction / Diffraction; Circulation / Circulation) was created three weeks after Cyclone Katrina. The title refers to the work of the same name by Caravaggio from 1607
  • 2004: Seven Acts of Mercy (Seven Acts of Mercy)
  • 2003: Congress (Congress)
  • 2001: Untitled I. The work was auctioned in 2010 for $ 850,000.

Exhibitions (selection)

Mogamma (A Painting In Four Parts) by Julie Mehretu at dOCUMENTA (13)

Public collections

Awards and scholarships (selection)

  • 2005 American Art Award 2005 - Whitney Museum of Art, New York
  • 2005 MacArthur Fellow
  • 2003 Artist in Residency at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
  • 2002 Penny McCall Foundation Grant
  • 2001 The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant AIR Program at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY

literature

  • Julie Mehretu. Black City. With texts by Lawrence Chua, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Augustin Pérez, Marcus Steinweg. Edited by MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castillia y Leon. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2007, ISBN 978-3-7757-1863-9
  • Douglas Fogle (Ed.): Julie Mehretu. Drawing into painting. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2003, ISBN 0-935640-74-6
  • Parquet No. 76: Julie Mehretu, Yang Fudong , Lucy McKenzie. Parkett, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-907582-36-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 18, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Lisa Zeitz: Contemporary Art: Last Loosening of the Lehman Brothers . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . October 6, 2010 (with picture )
personal data
SURNAME Mehretu, Julie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter of Ethiopian origin
DATE OF BIRTH 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH Addis Ababa