Excerpt (Riot) 2003

Julie Mehretu made this expressionistic painting using ink and acrylic on canvas. The marks are very gestural, and the color palette is mostly black, white, and grey with splashes of red and yellow. I can just imagine the act of painting itself, of how the artwork came into being, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. Mehretu may have been thinking about the dynamics of crowds and protests in the context of social and political unrest and how to visualize the intensity and chaos of those scenes. There is a sense of the work being built up in layers with some areas obscured or partially erased. The thin paint allows her to create transparency, depth, and complexity, adding to the emotional and intellectual resonances of the work. The red lines feel particularly charged, like flashes of anger. Mehretu's approach resonates with other artists who explore abstraction and gesture to convey complex ideas and emotions. It reminds me of other painters who use expressive mark-making to capture the energy and dynamism of the world around them.