Saturday, July 12, 2014

Julie Mehretu

Julie's work is very amazing.  Huge huge canvasses filled in with layers of drawing and color and fluid motion filled with definitive lines and small details.  You can gaze at one of her works for a long time and never discover everything.  Here is the entry about her (in part) from Wikipedia.

"Mehretu is known for her large-scale paintings and drawings and her technique of layering different elements and media. Her paintings are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. 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 for stadiums, international airports, and other public gathering hubs, seen from different perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her drawings are preparatory to her large paintings, and sometimes interim between paintings...

In 2000, Mehretu was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award.  On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."

...In 2007, while completing a residency at the American Academy in Berlin, Julie Mehretu received the 15th commission of the Deutsche Bank and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The body of work she created, Grey Area, was composed of six large-scale paintings, completed between 2007 and 2009 in a studio in Berlin.


Mehretu's painting Untitled 1 sold for $1.02 million at Sotheby's in September 2010.  It's estimated value had been $600–$800,000. 


At Art Basel in 2014, White Cube sold Mehretu’s Mumbo Jumbo (2008) for $5 million. 


Mehretu is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and by White Cube in London as well as by carlier gebauer in Berlin."

Okay - we will talk about something completely different tomorrow (I know, it is technically tomorrow right now) - but this has been an interesting investigation into the art world, I think.

~Alex

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