Julie Mehretu (b. 1970)

Mehretu has developed an idiosyncratic system of dots, dashes, arrows, circles, crosses, squares, curlicues and organic shapes which she repeats in dense, built-up passages suggesting fragments of a large, albeit ambiguous, narrative. Her signs are expressively charged, much as Vincent van Gogh's abstract marks carry personal emotion even as they coalesce into representation. Mehretu's frenetic forms swirl, float and march as they burst through numerous spatial envelopes--overlaying, underlying and intersecting crisp, delicately drawn lines. Bands, parallelograms and arcs of colour torque the picture space and bring the multiplanar activity up to the surface. Her works are epic dramas, as lyrical as they are combustible, that deconstruct conventional notions of space and time (S. Harris, "Julie Mehretu at the Project," Art in America, March 2002).