Julie Mehretu – RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting

Video (53:26): Cheryl Sim in conversation with artist Julie Mehretu about her works on display as a part of the group exhibition “RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting” which runs through Nov. 29, 2020 at Phi Fundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada.

‘Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas and overlaid with marks in pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place, as well as a collapse of art-historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of abstract expressionist colour field painting. Through a cacophony of marks, her works seem to represent the speed of the modern city, depicted, perhaps contradictorily, with the timeless materials of pencil and paint’. – Phi Fundation for Contemporary Art.

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