An Interview with Julie Mehretu

This interview was conducted at the artist’s studio in New York City on Thursday, June 13, 2013.

WOUBSHET:

I thought that we would begin by discussing your current solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, Liminal Squared. Let me say at the outset that it is a remarkable show.

MEHRETU:

Thank you.

WOUBSHET:

Partly because it showcases your talent as a painter in large and small scale paintings as well as drawings and etchings—so I love that range—partly too because of the departure you seem to make from the body of work you have carried out in the past decade, culminating one could say in your 2010, 20 x 85 feet painting, Mural. In the new set of works, at least this is my impression, absent are the irregular geometric shapes that often populate your paintings; also instead of a wide spectrum of color you have opted for a grey chromatic scale. So even when color appears in paintings like Fever graph (algorithm for serendipity) or Insile it blushes in pastels instead of exploding in vibrant hues. So, I wonder if we could begin there—why the turn not away from color, but the turn into grey, if you will?

MEHRETU:

The turn into grey, I like that better than the turn away from color—it’s true. This idea of turning into grey really started to come into my work during the time I was in Berlin and I was working on Mural. That painting was almost a kind of time capsule for all the work that I had been doing up until that point. Almost ten years of work was collapsed somehow into that piece—all their forms and shapes—into this huge vessel, this Arc of work in a way. It was peculiar then in the studio because as I was working on this huge symphonic painting with an intense amount of color, more than ever before, more than even the marks and the architecture, color is supreme in that painting. It plays the role of all the agents: a sonic element, a speed element, a time and place element, all within the shapes and the way the color interacts. And while I was working on that piece I simultaneously began work on what became the Grey Area paintings. In a way, that turn to grey—with the paintings for the Guggenheim—perhaps is more a move through grey, then slowly color starts to emerge ever so slightly. I think for me color has always had a sort of social role, a descriptive role, it has a lot of other resonances in terms of meaning, but it worked specifically for me as cultural code. One of my interests in these new paintings has been how the architecture and the drawing, the hand, are becoming more fused to allow for a different space or a different form to emerge. It’s as if a new way of using the color has come into the work, and it had to come from within it, be born of it, where it is not a suggestion of a sign or another form. Color became so complicated in that painting [Mural] and what I was most interested in investigating in the new work—especially with the architectural stuff I was looking at, these ruins, cultural fissures, social gaps, these structures where complex cultural coded social language could be suggested—well, color wasn’t really a part of my thinking. So the drawing, the architecture, the new forms, moving through this other way of making where there is almost a, not neutrality, but a different type of possibility, it allowed for a different type of potential that with the color would be too determinate.

Julie Mehretu, Algorithms/Apparitions/Translations (2013) Portfolio of five etchings utilizing combinations of hardground, aquatint, spitbite, softground, drypoint, and engraving (31 ¾” x 37 ¼”)

Photographed by James Dee, 2013 Printed by Gregory Burnet and published by Burnet Editions

Julie Mehretu, Mural (2009) Ink and acrylic on canvas (22’ x 80’)

Photographed by...