Exhibition

Julie Mehretu | Metoikos (in between paintings)

17 Sep 2021 – 13 Nov 2021

Regular hours

Friday
11:00 – 18:00
Saturday
11:00 – 18:00
Tuesday
11:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 18:00
Thursday
11:00 – 18:00

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carlier | gebauer

Berlin, Germany

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  • U6 Kochstrasse
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carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce Metoikos (in between paintings) the third solo exhibition of American artist Julie Mehretu.

About

A sense of volatility marks Julie Mehretu’s most recent canvases. Roiling black lines, smudges, eruptions of color, and halftone patterns unfold atop lucid, saturated grounds, which are countered by luminous shapes and fragments that seem to hover above the tangled compositions like a simmering, spectral residue. As the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson notes about the Mehretu’s formal transitions over the past decade, “The clean, centripetal choreography that once stood for the global has given way to contaminated streams and surges.” 

Mehretu considers abstraction a space of unknowing, of possibility—that which offers something beyond language, a space of potential that cannot be articulated otherwise. Painting is thereby a means, in Mehretu’s words, to “think through the struggle in an alternative, abstract way.” Her newest works respond to a diverse set of images related to current events, ranging from immigrant detention centers and social upheaval to ecological disasters. These photographs, some of which she keeps in her studio for months or even years before finding a point of entry for the work, form the “DNA” of the painting. Using Photoshop, Mehretu distorts the image beyond recognition, at times combining multiple images, before building a layered composition with paint, screenprint, airbrush, and ink. Subsumed beneath accumulations of riotous, luminous marks, the specificity and source of the image is sublimated yet remains, as Mehretu claims, the “pain and the source of the image.”

Parallel to the new paintings, Mehretu will also display a suite of etchings entitled Slouching Towards Bethlehem (2020). Distorted news images of anti-immigration protests comprise the base layers of these prints, whose title cites Joan Didion’s canonical 1967 essay, which itself quotes William B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming (1919). Created during a moment marked by the uncertainty of a global pandemic, the rising tide of racially-motivated violence and police brutality, and the creeping spread of fascist authoritarianism, Mehretu harnesses both the dread and the precarious sense of openness present in both literary works to articulate a communal space guided by intuituion, an “ontological congregation of resistance.”

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Julie Mehretu

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