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Lot Essay
Multilayered and multi-referential, Julie Mehretu’s Ringside is an early masterpiece from the acclaimed Ethiopian American painter exhibiting the techniques, motifs, and concerns which have become hallmarks of her oeuvre. Painted in 1999, the year of Mehretu’s much-fêted arrival to the New York art world, Ringside is one of the artist’s first large-scale mature paintings. Mehretu here engages deeply with the history of painting, reinvigorating the traditional history genre with the possibility of depicting multiple discrete moments simultaneously—presenting the past, present, and possible futures together across a singular tableau. The artist describes how she was “working with the history and tradition of painting,” creating “story maps of no location” which were also attempts to chart her own identity (J. Mehretu, quoted in C. Y. Kim, “Julie Mehretu (A Chronology in Four Parts),” in Julie Mehretu, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2019, p. 55). Mehretu boldly explores the limits of space, shattering the three-dimensional perspective conceived in the Renaissance with a new spatial paradigm through homogenization and fragmentation. Her canvases concurrently express complete flatness and infinite space; the critic Lawrence Chua describes the effect, writing, “the space in the foreground appears to both create and destroy those spaces. It’s as if one is witnessing the siege of a great city and its simultaneous resurrection” (L. Chua, “Julie Mehretu,” in Julie Mehretu, Black City, exh. cat., Museo de Arte Contempoáneo de Castilla y León, León, 2006, p. 11).
Mehretu integrates imagery culled from disparate sources—including architectural blueprints, airport architecture and flight plans, military fortifications, topographies, modernist skyscrapers, and city maps—into her paintings, utilizing these physical sites as referents for investigating the physical and metaphysical structures where social, economic, and political activity take place. “I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions,” Mehretu explains. “I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power” (J. Mehretu, quoted in J. Young, “Layering and Erasure: An Introduction to Julie Mehretu,” in Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, exh. cat., Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 2009, p. 29).
Across the expansive canvas of Ringside, Mehretu meticulously incises these images in miniscule scale, constructing a cartographic expanse of signs and symbols poignantly pulled from the past. The artist executes these wireframe architectural drawings directly over an initial layer of gesso primer. She then adds the overlapping planes of pale yellow, blue and green, which act like spatial prisms shattering the painting’s perspective into infinite directions. Each abstracted color element operates as an independent spatial zone, deconstructing the painting’s surface. Describing this effect, which Mehretu had first achieved the year prior, the critic Cay Sophie Rabinowitz writes how “it masquerades as a map of some landscape as seen from above, but there is no legend to explain the relation of a particular mark to a force, place, or person” (C. S. Rabinowitz, “Mehretu’s Explorations of the Arcadian Enigma,” in Julie Mehretu, Black City, op. cit., p. 21).
Mehretu applies a thin layer of acrylic medium over her drawings and shapes of flat color, which she then sands down to achieve a perfectly polished, transparent surface. The artist describes that she conceived of her underdrawings in figurative terms, as “a few characters that huddled together and created a community. As they migrated and mixed with other characters, they made new cities. Eventually the whole terrain would be drawing upon, and entangled within, a narrative. When that was saturated with drawing, I would pour the acrylic-and-silica mixture of paint over the entire surface” (J. Mehretu, quoted in C. Y. Kim, op. cit., p. 57). She then began drawing her more abstracted forms in ink over this newly refined surface, creating an idiosyncratic system of minuscule marks, peppering dots, dashes, circles, arrows, and stairways into the composition with mathematical precision. Operating methodically, Mehretu animates the composition with her dynamic mark-making, which she developed to articulate a relationship between the particular and the systematic. Mehretu was determined to portray how individuals and communities interact among each other and within their environments, noting how she “arrived at the question of how to link my interest in the formation of social identity with my work. I began to look at my mark-making lexicon as signifiers of social agency, as individual characters” (J. Mehretu, quoted J. Young, op. cit., p. 29-30).
Ringside marks the end of Julie Mehretu’s formative period and the beginning of her esteemed mature career. Made in 1999, the year the artist returned to New York, the present work recapitulates a decade of dedicated practice into a radically original painting whose style Mehretu continues to expand upon today. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, as well as older contemporaries including Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, Mehretu discovered her idiosyncratic drawing language in 1996 while completing the MFA Program in Painting and Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. In the mid-1990s, Mehretu found that exploring different drawing techniques was a way to “make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment” (J. Mehretu, quoted in C. Y. Kim, op. cit., p. 57). Two years later, while enrolled in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Mehretu produced her first large canvases, melding her previous drawing technique with her now-emblematic architectural underdrawings and colorful planes. Mehretu’s move in the spring of 1999 to a studio in Bushwick, New York, in anticipation of her 2000-2001 stint as the Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, heralds the artist’s triumphant entry into the highest echelons of artistic achievement.
Ringside was made just as Mehretu was beginning her mature career, the work executed as she was on the precipice of fame. Expressing with confidence novel forms and stylistic solutions which would go on to populate Mehretu’s later works, witnessing the present work is almost prophetic. The curator Christine Y. Kim compares standing in front of one of Mehretu’s paintings as like “tottering on the precipice of an abyss, or seeing between and through the layers of a palimpsest of time” (C. Y. Kim, op. cit., p. 55). The experience of viewing Ringside is even more evocative, as while the viewer sifts through the layers of time depicted on the canvas, they simultaneously observe the motifs and forms which the artist would return to again and again throughout her remarkable career.
Mehretu integrates imagery culled from disparate sources—including architectural blueprints, airport architecture and flight plans, military fortifications, topographies, modernist skyscrapers, and city maps—into her paintings, utilizing these physical sites as referents for investigating the physical and metaphysical structures where social, economic, and political activity take place. “I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions,” Mehretu explains. “I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power” (J. Mehretu, quoted in J. Young, “Layering and Erasure: An Introduction to Julie Mehretu,” in Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, exh. cat., Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 2009, p. 29).
Across the expansive canvas of Ringside, Mehretu meticulously incises these images in miniscule scale, constructing a cartographic expanse of signs and symbols poignantly pulled from the past. The artist executes these wireframe architectural drawings directly over an initial layer of gesso primer. She then adds the overlapping planes of pale yellow, blue and green, which act like spatial prisms shattering the painting’s perspective into infinite directions. Each abstracted color element operates as an independent spatial zone, deconstructing the painting’s surface. Describing this effect, which Mehretu had first achieved the year prior, the critic Cay Sophie Rabinowitz writes how “it masquerades as a map of some landscape as seen from above, but there is no legend to explain the relation of a particular mark to a force, place, or person” (C. S. Rabinowitz, “Mehretu’s Explorations of the Arcadian Enigma,” in Julie Mehretu, Black City, op. cit., p. 21).
Mehretu applies a thin layer of acrylic medium over her drawings and shapes of flat color, which she then sands down to achieve a perfectly polished, transparent surface. The artist describes that she conceived of her underdrawings in figurative terms, as “a few characters that huddled together and created a community. As they migrated and mixed with other characters, they made new cities. Eventually the whole terrain would be drawing upon, and entangled within, a narrative. When that was saturated with drawing, I would pour the acrylic-and-silica mixture of paint over the entire surface” (J. Mehretu, quoted in C. Y. Kim, op. cit., p. 57). She then began drawing her more abstracted forms in ink over this newly refined surface, creating an idiosyncratic system of minuscule marks, peppering dots, dashes, circles, arrows, and stairways into the composition with mathematical precision. Operating methodically, Mehretu animates the composition with her dynamic mark-making, which she developed to articulate a relationship between the particular and the systematic. Mehretu was determined to portray how individuals and communities interact among each other and within their environments, noting how she “arrived at the question of how to link my interest in the formation of social identity with my work. I began to look at my mark-making lexicon as signifiers of social agency, as individual characters” (J. Mehretu, quoted J. Young, op. cit., p. 29-30).
Ringside marks the end of Julie Mehretu’s formative period and the beginning of her esteemed mature career. Made in 1999, the year the artist returned to New York, the present work recapitulates a decade of dedicated practice into a radically original painting whose style Mehretu continues to expand upon today. Influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, as well as older contemporaries including Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, Mehretu discovered her idiosyncratic drawing language in 1996 while completing the MFA Program in Painting and Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. In the mid-1990s, Mehretu found that exploring different drawing techniques was a way to “make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment” (J. Mehretu, quoted in C. Y. Kim, op. cit., p. 57). Two years later, while enrolled in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Mehretu produced her first large canvases, melding her previous drawing technique with her now-emblematic architectural underdrawings and colorful planes. Mehretu’s move in the spring of 1999 to a studio in Bushwick, New York, in anticipation of her 2000-2001 stint as the Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, heralds the artist’s triumphant entry into the highest echelons of artistic achievement.
Ringside was made just as Mehretu was beginning her mature career, the work executed as she was on the precipice of fame. Expressing with confidence novel forms and stylistic solutions which would go on to populate Mehretu’s later works, witnessing the present work is almost prophetic. The curator Christine Y. Kim compares standing in front of one of Mehretu’s paintings as like “tottering on the precipice of an abyss, or seeing between and through the layers of a palimpsest of time” (C. Y. Kim, op. cit., p. 55). The experience of viewing Ringside is even more evocative, as while the viewer sifts through the layers of time depicted on the canvas, they simultaneously observe the motifs and forms which the artist would return to again and again throughout her remarkable career.