Julie Mehretu explains her print Epigraph, Damascus | Artist Interviews

if we think about periods of civil unrest of protests of war of destruction of architecture of communities of lives we think not only about the images of that but also the kind of the fear or the the terror the anxiety the violence the bodies moving in space and so what we have in epigraph Damascus is not only fragments of the city through these kind of architectural remnants and pieces that we see on the surface but also the sort of incoherence and instability cacophony that's conveyed in the brush marks and through the layers on top I've been working with her making for a long time and it's evolved with me in making the paintings Neil's had wanted to work together on a project for a while and one of the the technologies in that scene that he's really pushed into a different place as photograph yer being able to work on such a large photograph years so when Neil's came to the studio we had a big painting that was just basically on a white ground an architectural drawing that we had been doing working on for about a year a year and a half of buildings of Damascus that had been bombed or destroyed he came in and really carefully photographed that and reproduced just the line drawing from that layer that on to a black and white photographic blur and I did a whole layer of drawing on mylar that we were able to infuse those and layer them into one photograph ear plate so this was a different way to bring different kind of thinking together into etching and then on top of that I worked with another layer of copper plates with spit bite and aquatint directly on the copper in front of the print of the photograph ear plates but then we did another layer of copper plates and you see these kind of more purple marks and then over here they become more red and then here they become more green and those marks like here they become more green those marks were done with right on the copper in response to this other plates I worked in Reverse in that way and that became a very different language that then physically operates differently on the plate because it has a different form of texture when it's actually it's etched into the copper differently than the photograph here it kind of alters as it moves through the the piece and interacts with the blacks in very different ways I've been working with the architectural drawing since the late 90s and when I started to really try to build some type of social political metaphoric space in the painting thinking about the built environment as a kind of constructive social and thought for me bringing this into the collection during collectors committee in 2018 it was really important to have this piece because one is really able to see the variety of techniques that she's working with the imagery that she's looking at in the painting but also the advancement in printing techniques that she's always been very interested in investigating and interrogating and expanding throughout her practice an epigraph Damascus is really a masterwork in printmaking that not only shows us technically how she's able to do this but also how it has a relationship in the painting some of which are also in the collection

Channel: Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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Keywords: lacma, los angeles, art, museum

Id: TpINkOf_ruI

Length: 3min 33sec (213 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020