In Praise of Doubt: Julie Mehretu

We are happy to announce, that „Praise of Doubt“, the new exhibition at Punta della Dogana , Palazzo Grassi in Venice, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, features two large-scale works by New York painter Julie Mehretu . After being represented with her ground-breaking exhibition „Grey Area“ at both museums, the Guggenheim Berlin as well as in New York in 2010, Mehretu has used the last year to further her investigations in the specificities of place, history, architecture and its undercurrents in painting.

Mehretu’s intensely layered and highly articulated compositions, grasp the inscriptions of social praxis in architecture in formats commonly associated with the genre of history painting. Her painterly techniques are multifaceted, referencing the graphism of architectural drawings, of multiple forms of annotations, the colour blocking and fields of painterly modernism as well as the Situationist claims to re-appropriate the city scape in renewing its cartography. The two large canvases currently on view in Venice were specifically commissioned for this exhibition and demonstrate Mehretu’s uncompromised engagement with the contexts of her own visibility.

The two paintings, both large rectangular canvasses, one horizontal, one vertical, face one another in seizing the two city scapes of New York and Venice - the artist’s hometown and the home of the exhibition, both ports, which historically have developed through their harbours. On both canvases a specific gaze is constructed, filtering agglomerations of architecture, mounting up to an iconic confrontation: New York’s  horizontal landscape, seizes the fluctuations of crisis-ridden contemporary capitalism, opening them up as the stage of  present and coming insurrections, of antagonistic streams of actions and their discharging in the cityscapes. The Venice’s seemingly renaissance-like vertical format, with Punta della Dogana , in which Mehretu finished her work, articulates the structure of a town which subsisted in its architectural core for centuries, housing neoliberal merchandise now but still resembling their feudalistic predecessors. The same antagonisms are channelled in non simultaneous architectural gazes.

Mehretu’s two new paintings at the Palazzo Grassi make see how modern life has evolved not only in but also from its architectures as much as from the revenants of its prehistories, demonstrating the gazes it enables, or constrains.
 

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KünstlerInnen: Julie Mehretu