Julie Mehretu, Untitled

Mehretu's drawing enacts a dialogue between tracings from architectural plans or maps and her own abstract marks and characters. In this way the drawing is built up on the transparent Mylar like a kind of palimpsest. The range of visual language - from the meteorological and seismographic, to the organic and gestural - is incredibly varied, evoking contours, isobars, plans, outlines and cross-sections as well as smudges, clouds, ripples and waves. Mehretu has described her works as operating like 'narrative maps without a specific place or location'. [C. de Zegher, 'Julie Mehretu: Drawings', New York: Rizzoli, 2007, p. 33.]