Untitled

The practice of drawing and etching holds a central place in Julie Mehretu's work. Since her earliest pieces in the mid-1990s, the artist has developed and enriched a highly personal lexicon of graphic marks, which she arranges across the space of her canvases and drawings. While drawing is inseparable from her pictorial practice, the artist's body of ink drawings is generally more exploratory, completely eliminating references to contemporary events, the use of blurred photographs, and the various diagrams and architectural elements that usually form the initial layers of her paintings.

Indeed, for the artist, drawing functions as both a matrix and a laboratory: the space of the page is where she establishes her unique graphic vocabulary, testing different line qualities and their expressive power. The page thus accommodates a multitude of graphic experiments, removed marks, rapid annotations, and purely gestural strokes that demonstrate an ongoing process. Full scope is given to the spontaneity of the gesture, the pleasure of the line, its emotional charge, and its impulsive force.

Through drawing and engraving, the artist has said that she "[invents] a new form of language... architecture has collapsed... and there is the impression of a frantic mess, a desperate attempt at invention," so that the marks "function more as a written language, but are not legible." By allowing for improvisation and spontaneity, drawing also becomes a means to explore an entire unconscious heritage of gestures stemming from human history and various currents of expression, from the automatic drawings of the Surrealists to Henri Michaux's mescaline drawings, and to Chinese painting and calligraphy.