Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation

Julie Mehretu: The more geometric abstract shapes you see are comprised of tracings and copies of different airport diagrams and airport plans and airport maps, transit stations, subway platforms, things that are conduits to move you through these kinds of spaces of mobility. 

Narrator: Mehretu made this painting while living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and doing an artist in residency program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In addition to commuting around the city, she also began traveling more frequently to participate in group exhibitions. 

Julie Mehretu: I started to be really interested in ways of transit and ways of mobility and ways of migration and movement patterns, social movement patterns, in differently interconnected reality.

You have parts of ancient ruins in there, and there's almost this kind of exploratory collapse of historical built space—especially in terms of thinking about urban space as a general phenomenon, not trying to locate it in one city or one space, particularly, or even one period of time.

Narrator: The painting’s large scale also contributes to the meditation on movement through space.

Julie Mehretu: It has this breadth [and] you have to kind of travel through it. So you have a perspective of the entire painting from a distance, but as you get closer to it, that painting fragments into these various parts.