Episode #106: Julie Mehretu puts the finishing touches on her large-scale painting "Mural" at Goldman Sachs, adjusting shapes and colors in dialogue with the architecture and views from the street. Julie Mehretu's paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings' wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu's delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction. Learn more about Julie Mehretu at: http://www.art21.org/artists/julie-mehretu VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Thanks: Erika Fortner; Jessica Kingdon; Goldman, Sachs, & Co.; Harmony Murphy; and Damien Young.

Comments

1. It's just noise to everyone but you, lady.
2. Not impressed with this.
3. GETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT DUNKED ON!
4. k
5. c
6. i
7. s
8. d
9. d
10. BORING MABYE ... Mabye FIND THE I 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111I1111111111111111111111111111111111
11. C L E A N !
12. nice contemporary mural
13. wonderful work.
14. she is great.
15. eyes are freaky
16. Marvelous!
17. idont think something like this needs to be painted by hand..i mean its nice that they spent all the time but if its going to be drawn up on a computer first ..maybe its because im looking at this on a video..what id really like to know is how she got such a big contract .painting that on ladders would be a bitch
18. i happen to like everything everything and i know what the painting is saying to me
19. sadly underinformed.
20. @larssvanholm total fraud