Tuesday, January 5, 2010

architectonic art by Julie Mehretu

Mehretu’s points of departure are architecture and the city, particularly the accelerated, compressed and densely populated urban environments of the 21st Century. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with different geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings, seen from different perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her paintings present a tornado of visual incident where gridded cities become fluid and flattened, like many layers of urban graffiti. Mehretu has described her rich canvases as ‘story maps of no location’, seeing them as pictures into an imagined, rather than actual reality. Through its cacophony of marks, her work seems to represent the speed of the modern city depicted, conversely, with the time-aged materials of pencil and paint.


















4 comments:

  1. Beautiful Paintings. I could defenitely feel the speed of modern cities just looking at them.

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  2. ya...wow; really dynamic, a great marriage of disciplined and free hand drawings.

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  3. I particularly love the black and white with a hint of ochre!

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  4. I like your perfect usage of the colors in the necessary places. This type of Modern Art is liked by many people.

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