Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu creates large scale, gestural paintings that are built up with layers of acrylic and then worked into through mark making using ink pen, pencil and streams of paint. Her work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place, as well as the collapse of art historical references e.g. dynamism of the Italian futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of abstract expressionist colour field painting.
She creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies, with a frenetic mark making that, for the artists, becomes a way of signifying social agency as well as suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography.
She blends elements of Abstract Expressionism with Pop Art, and her work bears the influence of important 20th-century abstractionists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian.
