Existing comment:
Julie Mehretu
Empirical Construction, Istanbul, 2003
The subject of this painting-drawing hybrid is Istanbul, a city perched on the border between Europe and Asia. The large scale of the work captures the epic dimension of the site, which was a capital of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires. The sweeping scale is also crucial to the picture's impact and reflects Mehretu's interest in epic history painting and her aim to engage the viewer physically.
The Hagia Sophia -- an Eastern Orthodox church converted first to a mosque, then to a museum -- occupies the center of this frenzied metropolis. Around it Mehretu has articulated the texture of the city in both its globalized modernity and its specificity, which she reveals through symbols and other signifiers: the star and crescent, flags, and Islamic architectural and decorative motifs. Graphic shapes and expressive marks swarm and obscure these meticulously drawn details. The result is a portrait -- or, better, a palimpsest -- of a city, teeming with details and with ghostly traces, all layered within the thin sheets of acrylic Mehretu sprays onto the canvas, trapping space and time to create provocative metaphors for the creation of cities. "I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics," the artist has reflected, "and that's why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don't think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power." |