Portfolio

My initial impulse and investigation is to try and develop, through drawing, a language that can communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having a character, a modus operandi of social behavior. When I’m working I am usually listening to music, and I have always been interested in the juxtaposition of looking at images and listening, so I was intrigued by the challenge of being asked to create a group of drawings in response to Das Rheingold. It also reminded me of Berlin, where I’ve been living on and off since 2007, and where I enjoy going to the opera.

Mind Breath Drawings was shown at the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center in an exhibition entitled Julie Mehretu: Notations on the Ring, September 23, 2010–January 29, 2011. It was inspired by and coincided with the first installment, Das Rheingold, of the director Robert Lepage’s production of the Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera.

Mind Breath Drawings, graphite on paper, 25″ × 36″, 2010. © Julie Mehretu. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.