Untitled (yellow with ellipses)

Narrator: Mehretu structured this painting around an X-Y axis—an Enlightenment era measuring tool. But rather than plotting rational data points onto its grid, Mehretu contrasts it with the fluid movement of the abstract marks she calls “characters.” 

Julie Mehretu: Each mark in its gesture and its making suggests a certain type of behavior. 

Narrator: Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu: The different marks and the different kinds of glyphs and “characters”—as I call them—behave and interact differently. 

I started to really think of each mark in this very abstract way as having social agency. Agency comes from not just an agent on its own, but the way that it's recognized or understood, or connected is by a context and by some type of social context that it's put in. That construct is invented in that space.

And then I started to think about the paintings as being this kind of terrain space and I would map the actual terrain space. And this is the first painting where I tried to collapse the map and the drawing into one space. 

And so I was playing with that type of information, just to experiment and feel out how these types of visual... I mean, this is really early, just after grad school when I was really just playing around and trying to understand what I was even interested in trying to do with this language.

Narrator: As you explore the works in this room, you’ll see Mehretu exploring the relationship of the individual to real and imagined space in other ways, too. The largest painting in the room is called Apropos. 

Julie Mehretu: This was a scale that was kind of like my body, a little bit bigger than my body, so that you were somewhat immersed in this map and in this aerial space. And then, the underpainting—I was playing with the suggestions and the colors of the charts—I started to think of as a reflection of the room that the painting was going to be shown in.