“Grey Area” by Julie Mehretu consists of six paintings that confront the transformation of urban civilization into dereliction. Mehretu creates wall-sized works that layer sweeping gestural marks with painstaking architectural renderings. Superimposition of the precise line drawings occludes the logic of the individual structures, leaving the viewer with a painting that at once recedes into infinite illusionistic space yet maintains a spectral, particulate presence on the surface of the canvas.
"Middle Grey", 2007-2009, Ink and acrylic on canvas,10' x 14'.
Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born American artist based in New York, created this suite during a two-and-a-half year residency in Berlin. Almost all of the works presented in “Grey Area” are associated with a particular cityscape. “Believer’s Palace” refers to the crumbled royal homestead atop Saddam’s Baghdad bunker. “Atlantic Wall” draws from the interiors of WWII German trenches along Europe’s Atlantic coastline, and photographs from pre-war Berlin informed “Berliner Plätze”, to name a few. Re-energizing traditional landscape painting, Mehretu revives a Romantic-era fascination with ruins that appeals to the Indiana Jones within each of us. Lest we forget, Mehretu is still an abstract painter; here, her employment of precisely rendered sites, rather than more conceptual representations of desertion, allows a non-art audience to tap into her work. She may be a red hot contemporary artist, but the kid on the bench next to me, bored on a summer camp daytrip, still thought her works made him “feel like Tomb Raider”. Attention, non-Art and Visual Culture majors: it’s contemporary art, but you’ll “get it”.
At first, the impressive size of the paintings implores the viewer to stand back and absorb the spiraling, drifting compositions in their entirety. However, the undulating grey tones created with thin India ink lines, just barely perceptible from this distance, ignited an insatiable curiosity in all of the museum-goers in the gallery during the hour and a half I spent there. Every single person felt the need to inspect at least one of the fourteen-foot paintings from a just couple of inches away. Here comes the conceptual part: Mehretu intentionally creates work that looks very different from different distances, forcing viewers to constantly adjust their perspective to see the piece in full, just as city-dwellers must constantly adapt to frenetic urban life and the flux of modern culture.
Detail of "Berliner Plätze", 2008-2009, Ink and acrylic on canvas, 10' x 14'. Detail shows approx. 4 in x 6 in.
Though I have not read anything Mehretu has actually said on the subject of medium, I thought the use of pen and ink for works on a grand scale imbued politics. When you think ink, you think written word. (Even in the art world, ink is not readily associated with works larger than the average sketchbook.) This painter uses ink, not paint, to comment on the dilapidation of civilization, on the devastation of modern wars. She takes documentation from city planning archives, reproduces it in the exact same medium that some faceless government worker originally used to design it, and she repeats it until she has a lurching, cacophonous swarm of impossible forms. She’s subtle about it though—these works are at home in the institutional white cube, unlike pop-hued street art that has cornered the market for urban political statements. A Mehretu painting would not be the leader of a widely publicized riot on The Man’s front lawn; it would be The Man’s favorite butler who slowly begins to add cyanide to his master’s morning coffee.
My only grievance: this show is too small on its own to justify the Guggenheim’s steep $18 admission ($15 with student ID). Or at least in too small of a space. I think you can make six paintings feel like a serious exhibit of new work if the paintings are big enough, which Mehretu’s are. However, crammed into one of the Guggenheim’s little galleries off the cavernous rotunda, I was disappointed with the decisions made by Associate Curator Joan Young. As large pillars obstructed parts of the paintings when seen from the distance needed to observe the whole width, this gallery seemed better suited for smaller works. I also felt the complexity of the pieces was poorly served by the high volume of visitors always found quickly passing through the lower floors. (Likewise, I think Russian Supremativist Malevich, with his high-impact, extremely spare geometric works now on view, would have been pissed to find himself in a slow, contemplative gallery on the sixth floor, whereas Mehretu would have greatly benefitted.) Young made the only informative wall text, other than a few intro sentences for the complete layman, tiny and awkwardly placed out of the line of sight of the general flow of traffic. I think every show in a major museum should be worth the full admission fare on its own; the Guggenheim sold Mehretu short.
Bottom line: Definitely go! But go on Saturdays from 5:45pm-7:45pm when the Guggenheim is “Pay What You Wish.” (Get there early or face a wicked long line of hipsters on dates.)
Julie Mehretu: Grey Area is on view until October 6th.
Guggenheim Museum- 5th Ave and 89th St (take the 4,5,6 to 86th St)
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/julie-mehretu-grey-area
More info from her gallery: http://www.whitecube.com/artists/mehretu/
Image credits: Exhibition catalog, Julie Mehretu: Grey Area. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. New York: 2010.
This is a very thought provoking interpretation of the artist and her work. Thanks!