Julie Mehretu, O Salmacis, Ink and acrylic on canvas, 2020
Artist/Maker:
Julie Mehretu
Bio:
American, b. Ethiopia, 1970
Title:
O Salmacis
Date:
2020
Medium:
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Dimensions:
68 1/4 × 52 in. (173.4 × 132.1 cm)
Credit Line:
Gift of The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation
Accession Number:
2022-75

Not On View

Julie Mehretu has reinvented landscape painting for the twenty-first century in her cerebral, technically ingenious, and technologically inflected compositions. Mehretu is interested in the structure of the urban environment, migration, and the various networks that form the bedrock of modern life. These networks include transportation, telecommunications, finance, as well as legal, cultural, and linguistic systems that undergird our interactions and even our personhood. Mehretu renders this tangled web in magisterial paintings that often contain intricate drawings. In abstract works such as O Salmacis the artist’s physical gestures while creating the painting are evident, perhaps referring to written language or other systems of notation. The bottom portion of the piece looks as if it is submerged in a tank of murky liquid, perhaps a reference to the water nymph from Greek mythology who is invoked in the work’s title.

Information may change as a result of ongoing research.

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