Julie Mehretu: Africa’s Gift to the 21st century Art World On May 10, 2004, The REDCAT Gallery at the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles opened an important exhibition of twelve paintings titled, “Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting.” On the occasion of this exhibition, the art critic, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, Christopher Knight, wrote a piece titled “A Terrible Beauty.” Knight who noticed the poignant characteristics of Julie’s work and her concern and total involvement in the contemporary global situation wrote: “It’s especially heartening to see a young artist grapple with contemporary social reality without any sense of grandiosity.” Julie, one of the most sought after artists of the 21st century, never seems to become exhausted from producing her huge canvases “over-the-top epic narrative” about her deep felt personal experience of the world. Julie’s surroundings cannot allow her to be indifferent and insensitive to the devastating and annoying presence and persistent puzzle of contemporary reality. Its all too real and tough, rough, monstrous and ugly manifestation has become constant driving force for her creativity. In breathtaking flawless and overwhelming beautiful works, Julie describes in minute detail the displacement, the anguish, the frustration, and the terrible dilemma and absurdity we all face. As she has said, her work is about what is happening in the world in abstract terms, but is not an illustration of what is going on in current events. Two of her major works, Renegade Delirium, which might rightly be subtitled as indicated by Knight as Apocalypse, Again and Dispersion are the epic narrations of the 9//11 tragedy. 9/11, and its aftermath -- the monstrous, the absurd cannot but more concretely described and narrated than through Julie’s style. Style and cry are simultaneous, both closely intertwined in each moment of the painting. What is surprising is that this principle allows at the same time an intense expression of Julie’s inner world. The beauty of the work lies precisely in this power, this bursting and exploding seen as it were in slow motion, freeze or as in Hollywood style, a special effect. It pounds, and explodes, like the powerful heart beat and pulse of an angry and frustrated individual or like a bird in captivity. It is powerful, serious and at the same time beautiful and exposes the terrible contemporary world situation. Julie was able to inscribe a surmounted cry and tragedy on the work where style and anguish combine in a perfect harmonization. In the international edition of The Art Newspaper published in June 2004, Jean Clair, director of the Musee Picasso, Paris, argues that there is no equivalent today to Picasso’s Guernica. As far as presenting a dazzling and definitive witness where other means of communication give only thin, ephemeral information, Renegade Delirium and Dispersion are perfect and the ultimate answer to the question he raised: “Where are the prophets of art?” In the post communism digital world, and post 9/11, where the reality of murderous religious and ethnic strife and right-wing and fascist revival is rampant, Julie’s works, and in particular, Dispersion is charged with power and duty of art that is equivalent to Picasso’s Guernica. With this painting, Julie raised subject matter that deals with a savage atrocity committed on defenseless people, similar to how Picasso expressed the similar emotions from the Spanish Civil War in his Guernica nearly 70 years ago. Both Guernica and Dispersion embody “a terrible beauty” and are “visions of life’s terrible beauty” and horrible truth. However, Picasso’s commissioned work, Guernica, was localized and constrained by model elements taken from past symbols and legendary history and became a pure cry in the avant-garde style of the last century. Julie’s Dispersion, in the style and language of postmodernism aesthetics, popular culture and cyber design is a deep felt feeling and sorrow born from the pensive and creative power of an individual. Her enragement and inner lyricism is explosive and triumphant and transcends all hideous, racial, religious, gender and ethnic what have you, boundaries to repudiate all tyranny. In the last few years, Julie has been impartially compared and contrasted to giants of the World of art by several critics. Christopher Knight alone has had to bring forth at least a dozen Western artists from the Renaissance to the 20th century to Chinese art in order to describe his analyses and interpret her work. This approach is indeed true since Julie is a painter who has opened her mind widely to all kinds of influences but inherited an artistic expression of the last century. Julie’s work connects the Abstract era to Constructivism/Suprematism and her innovation and groundbreaking achievements are shown in her canvases full of meaning woven by an infinite number of kaleidoscopic forms from which a new kind of virtual world emerges. Wherever we do come from, she welcomes us to her virtual world by making pictures. From the perspective of Ethiopian and Ethiopian American Artists, Julie’s achievement is a culmination of the road taken by Ethiopian Modernists. Above and beyond, Julie’s phenomenon and her breakthrough into the mainstream art world will open even a larger venue and opportunity for contemporary artists of Non-Western background and racial minorities. Quite interestingly and contrary to the usual norms of mainstream critics, Julie’s work is not seen or associated with any racial, gender, or ethnic origin. Her background and her race as well have not seemed to play any role among a dozen critics who wrote on her work. In almost all the major reviews, she was not categorized as African American, Ethiopian America, and not even as an Immigrant artist. Only her birth place, Addis Ababa, is mentioned for the record. Is this fairness because she did not embrace or exploit some of the usual ethnic icons and motifs from her heritage? Or is it because the critics see in her a new identity born of exile or the immigrant experience and that her art is directed toward a different kind of audience? Or is the difference in attitude because Julie’s work is more conditioned by her present than it is by her past. These are many questions to raise, only to find out that all answers of course raise yet still more questions. At any rate, Julie's expression is a new reality, a new mode of representation, a new mode of virtualization and presents new forms of truth and surpasses the usual labeling. The exhibition of paintings by Julie Mehretu at the Disney Hall's REDCAT Gallery is also far from an “intriguing and… befuddling cultural event” as argued by Edward Goldman on the KCRW website in his commentary, “Is Julie Mehretu Such a Great Artist?” Julie Mehretu is surely one of the best artists of her generation. For better or for worse, if in the last century, Europe offered Picasso and the rest of the avant-garde artists to the art world, then simply put, Julie Mehretu can now be said to be one of the finest artists Africa has to offer to the 21st century art world. By: Esseye Medhin, July 29, 2004