Julie Mehretu: The Drawings (精装) 847829804

A recent recipient of the highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” Julie Mehretu is an important American artist. With several major solo exhibitions in the last few years, including a traveling exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of the Arts that debuts in fall 2007, Mehretu has captivated her audience with her ambitious large-scale wall installations that include a dizzying array of signs, symbols, and motifs worked into compositions that take as their point of departure architectural renderings and sketches. While known primarily as a painter, it is the artist’s drawings that drive her work; she produces scores of major drawings a year (while her output of paintings generally never exceeds ten in a given year.) Concerned with how individuals come to understand their place in the world–both metaphorically and physically–through their identification with different communities or their experience of different places, Mehretu has created a body of work that is as dynamic as the subjects with which she is engaged. In this book–the most comprehensive study of her exquisite drawings–the fullness of her ideas and explorations of form are considered. Catherine de Zegher is an independent curator and author specializing in contemporary drawing. She has edited several books, including Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine and, most recently, Women Artists at the Millennium. From 1999 to 2006, she was Director of the Drawing Center in New York City.Thelma Golden is the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem.