Julie Mehretu at the High Museum

Detail of Julie Mehretu's Mogamma (Part 2) painting at the High Museum of Art

Conversations with Contemporary Artists: Julie Mehretu

High Museum of Art

Julie will be speaking at the Alliance Theater on Monday, April 21 at 7 p.m. Mehretu is an internationally recognized artist who has been interrogating painting and its ability to respond the chaotic conditions of the contemporary world. 

In 2009 I wrote a paper while a PhD student at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art about Mehretu and the contemporary sublime. I suggested that in her early paintings such as Stadia I and Stadia II she was posing a collision of spatial systems that mimed the clashes between social behavior represented by organic mark-making and the institutional represented by architectural drawings of structures of power. I argued that the friction between these two systems produced a third space of potentiality, where something new can emerge from the chaos.

The High Museum of Art acquired one of the paintings in a cycle called Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts)  last spring. As a synopsis of the unpublished paper I wrote an essay for Burnaway.org that discusses these ideas in relation to the museum's acquisition of Part 2 in the cycle. The essay will be published on April 18.

Burnaway review of Mogamma (Part 2)