Interpretation: "Stadia II"

Stadia II

Julie Mehretu, circa 2004

6 September 2012

By Lauren Painter

Reaction: I fell in love almost instantaneously with Stadia II by Julie Mehretu. I favor any kind of piece with vivid colors and a certain “flow” to it. The initial stylistic elements and curvy lines, and disorganized setup were captivating. The layering was also fantastic, and brought a nice blend of order and chaos at the same time.

Visual: Mehretu uses a computer to make drawings and manipulate material like architectural layouts, which are then depicted onto her canvases. Dashes, lines and swirls are exotically bright and vivid in the spacious canvas of Stadia II. The imagery she uses in her work refers to the environment she said she thinks of when she makes the symbolical marks. She states that the marks are, ''agents that have character and behave in certain ways, as though they're constructing or deconstructing societies.''

Context & Background: Mehretu was born in 1970 in Ethiopia and currently lives and works in New York. Her work is more abstract—but it isn’t as abstract as it may appear, because of the layers and its exploding style. As the audience becomes absorbed into the abundance of layers, it conveys a sense of order. “The layers start to separate themselves, but never so much that they can be viewed as purely distinct. One cannot analyze one layer without falling into another. The idea of stadium evokes the idea of people coming together, sometimes miraculously in a beautiful way or in a hard way and the flags reflect a coming together internationally or nationally.”

Interpretation: Stadia II commands a lot of depth, both spatially and architecturally. The canvas is seemingly complex through her ladylike interpretations of explosions, fire, and water in both two and three dimensions. With many layers of acrylic paint and marks made by pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint, her work delivers a compression of time, space and place.

Evaluation: Mehretu has remarked that she draws from the past and imagines the future. Her spaces capture the sense of our time in history. Her work focuses on systems, architecture, and space. Mehretu brings an animated visual language into the art world that deals with reality today as much as it deals with the biography of herself as an artist in modern day society.