Julie Mehretu April 20, 2006

http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/events/mehretu.html

Julie Mehretu
an evening with the artist

Thursday, April 20, 6 pm

Reception will follow

presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
and the Harvard Advocate

Free and open to the public

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
For information: 617.495.3251

Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate semi-abstractions. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she is interested in "the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." The underlying structure of her work consists of socially charged public spaces?government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and airports?drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these de-contextualized, highly controlled spaces through the layering of personal markings. Mehretu achieves an effect of compositional maelstrom, as elements advance and recede within the graphically ambiguous spaces. With paintings that blur the line between figuration and abstraction while constantly referencing the world around us, she creates perfect metaphors for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the 21st century. (Statement from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)