Julie Mehretu
Provenance : [Propriété non datée]
- The Project, New YorkPrivate CollectionAcquired directly from the above by the present owner
Exhibited : Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast; London, Hayward Gallery; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou; Tokyo, Mori Art Museum; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Johannesburg, Art Gallery, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, 2004-07, p. 185, no. 84, illustrated in colour
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Notes : Showcased in the critically-acclaimed 2004-07 exhibition Africa Remix held at the Hayward Gallery in London and in the Centre Pompidou in Paris as well other locations, Julie Mehretu's Ruffian Logistics is a dynamically iconic painting from the artist's intricate and energetic oeuvre. Mehretu's paintings, layered with strata of acrylic and elaborately detailed with fine ink draughtsmanship, portray a compression of time, space and location. Informed by the languages of architecture, the city and a number of art historical references and executed with a frenetic and highly-worked mark making, the artist creates a sophisticated means of abstraction that relates to structures of aesthetics and invites contemplation on the structures and societies we inhabit. Mehretu's paintings depart from the inspirations of cities, architecture, and urban planning designs and focus on dense and frenzied contemporary urban environments. She deftly fuses disparate architectural features and geographical elements and building plans, all of which structure and control the movement of the masses and all of which the artist illustrates at once from varying viewpoints. The compounding of these fragments form chaotic and exploding images that appear propelled by a tornado-like force as the bursting vectors of colour and marks of immediacy extend from a centrifugal core. The marks, here densely populated in clusters across the painting, are representative of individuals, of figures and crowds of people on the move. Grouped together, the individual becomes part of a social group, a collective force which engulfs the entire composition and is representative of the speed of the modern city. The partially abstracted picture emanates the sensation of speed and subsequently compounds the viewer's experience as we begin visually to travel through the layers, through time and through historical moments and references at once. The historical references in Mehretu's paintings are further enhanced by the artist's frequent nods to the canon of art history while uniquely slanting each reference. Mehretu's brushwork recalls the techniques of Chinese calligraphy yet whereas with the traditional techniques characters are literally representational, Mehretu's mark making serves to connote the essence of the forms and ideas. Furthermore, that essence connects Mehretu's works to those of Wassily Kandinsky both formally and intellectually. The artist has found inspiration in Kandinsky's notion of the affective purpose of art which is based on the assumption that art must possess spirit in order to elicit a response from the viewer and that this soul, revealed through the balance of colours and composition, hinges on the integrity of the artist. Her ideas and depictions of the chaos of spaces reference Kandinsky's theories in his 1920 essay "The Great Utopia" where he discusses the inevitable implosion or explosion of our constructed spaces out of sheer necessity of expansion. With such informed inspirations, Mehretu is able successfully to reconcile many of the approaches of the past century's artists - uniting physical and sensual expressiveness and socially relevant reflection.
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