“The compositional and structural issues in my work are directly tied to the desire to take up arms and lead revolution... but my effort is to question these gestures, to take these myths apart.”
—Julie Mehretu Described by critic Susan Tallman as “careening, elegant mayhem”, Julie Mehretu’s art defies exact coherence, invoking instead a sense of the sublime entangled with peril. Corner of Lake and Minnehaha began with an Associated Press photograph by Julio Cortez depicting a striding protester carrying an inverted American flag backlit by a liquor store consumed by raging flames – an image of protest, destruction and chaos. The 2020 image was captured in Minneapolis, on the corner of Lake Street and Minnehaha where protesters were rioting over the unlawful death of George Floyd who died in police custody.

Born and raised in Ethiopia before civil war forced her family to immigrate to the US in 1977, Mehretu has centralised revolution in her work. For instance, her work created for Documenta 13 – the quinquennial multimedia exhibition held in Kassel, Germany, in 2012 – responded to the Arab Spring and continual protests across the world stage. As in Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, underpinning these works are architectural lines broken by pockets of colour, long arcs and staccato bursts creating a sense of sagittal depth. She stated, “I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power.” Infusing the monumental scale of the Abstract Expressionists with the precision of Eastern calligraphic mark-making, Mehretu established her own arena through which she continually probes the psycho-geographic link and historical complexity inherent in her combined national identity.

Details of Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (Blue)

In the present lot, Mehretu continues this interrogation in the visual language of screenprint and lithography. Mehretu cropped Cortez’s photograph, inversing and enlarging the digital stochastic interference to disrupt the coherent image and instead focus on the block-colours of cyan, magenta, and yellow, overlaid with Ben-Day dots of black. These oversized-Ben Day dots were a key trope of Pop art, adopted famously by Roy Lichtenstein, but employed here to different ends; whereas Lichtenstein retained the dots as a formal component of his graphic compositions, Mehretu was more interested in the atomised, quixotic spray of dots that defy coherence – both in narrative and formal structure. Over this static medley she drew layers of addenda with different screens, printed with the incendiary hues of the original source image as well as blue tones to create peppered, flickering halations.

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image: Giorgio Morara / Alamy Stock Photo

Mehretu’s Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (Blue) echoes the European grandeur of history painting, rekindling the heroic vitality of Delacroix’s 1830 Liberty Leading the People in a loose and expansive ephemera of unfolded layers rooted in the world of civil unrest. Both deeply personal and speaking to a wider audience under political regime and turmoil, Mehretu has created an abstract masterpiece of energy and entropy, construction and destruction, utopia and dissolution: a poet of the political sublime.
- Literature
  ars publicata, Julie Mehretu Editions, 2022.02

170

Julie Mehretu

Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (Blue)

2022
Screenprint in colours, on Coventry Rag paper, with full margins.
I. 120.5 x 93.9 cm (47 1/2 x 36 7/8 in.)
S. 139 x 110.5 cm (54 3/4 x 43 1/2 in.)
Signed, dated and numbered 7/45 in pencil (there were also 10 artist's proofs), published by Highpoint Editions, Minneapolis (with their blindstamp), framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£30,000 - 50,000 ‡

Sold for £30,480

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