Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) Part 2

Julie Mehretu: For the four paintings, I rented a space in Harlem where I could make the paintings at this height.

The underpainting is this just loose drawing of lines that I drew in the computer and stretched through these. And that was more just to create an under-dynamic through these paintings, some kind of coherent form.

And the colors from those come really from...they're basic colors that you put into flags, these kind of suggestions of those types of identities. 

There's about sixty cities. We researched all these squares and plätzes. Parts of these buildings are projected on and drawn into the paintings. And it took about a year to do that across the four paintings.

And then I had the studio to myself, without anyone else working with me, where I drew into the paintings with ink and acrylic, ink marks and brush marks and pens at times, but usually just the brush. It consumed the space, if you will, with the drawing, and reoriented what could happen in there. So the drawing really starts to become a different kind of contagion in the machine here, and it's really disruptive in a very different way, kind of becomes its own dynamic. When you see the four paintings together that sense becomes stronger in a way—that gesture becomes stronger than the architectural drawing.

You'll also see these small silkscreen elements, where I started to silkscreen eight-bit character things into the paintings, and throughout all of them. And some are very transparent and some are not. And somehow it was about this kind of digital noise that happens through the layering of all the architectural drawing.