A cacophonous assemblage of the debris of ancient civilizations and futuristic empires, Julie Mehretu’s monumental masterpiece Untitled from 2001 is among the artist's most important and most ambitious works. A palimpsest of frenzied marks that seem to emerge from unknown points within the composition only to dissolve into its totality, the sheer scale and depth of the multiple layers, fragile lines and optical coloured forms of the present work envelopes the viewer in a mesmerising synthesis of architecture, history and spatial experience. Both abstract and representational, these contoured forms at once advance and recede, with Untitled explosively synthesising abstract hieroglyphic symbolism and architectural visual vocabulary to produce a reimagining of public space. Committed to the politics of abstraction, Mehretu constructs an incendiary cartography that evokes atlas illustrations, architectonic assemblages, palatial balustrades and weather maps. These graphic explorations of space attempt to articulate the power structures and methods of mapping that define the contemporary urban landscape, as well as her own place within them. The gravitas of her conceptual ideology coupled with the skill and dexterity of her mark-making, as magnificently exemplified by the present work, have established Mehretu as a modern master and uniquely articulate voice of a socially, culturally, and politically wary generation.

Testifying to the calibre of this expansive work, Untitled was included in the 8th Baltic Triennial of International Art in 2002, as well as the Casino 2001: 1st Quadriennale voor Hedendaagse Kunst at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in 2002. It was around the year 2000 that the sleek, brightly coloured shapes began to traverse and dominate what had until this time been Mehretu’s black-and-white picture planes. Widely considered amongst the most important artists of her generation, Mehretu’s works from 2001-2004 are now held in numerous preeminent institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Honoured as a recipient of the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts in 2015, the artist’s mid-career survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019 and The Whitney Museum of American Art in 2021 was the most comprehensive overview of her practice to date, exploring the possibilities and parameters of abstraction, architecture, landscape, scale embodied in her work.

Since the late 1990s, Mehretu began employing architectural drawings, terrain maps and construction blueprints as both formal and conceptual tools within her abstract lexicon, generating an intricate visual vocabulary compellingly rooted in social, historical and geographic commentary: global population shifts, mobilised armies, urban mapping and structural planning. The artist has stated:"I don't think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power." (Julie Mehretu, quoted in Rob Alderson, “Artist Julie Mehretu explores how cities serve as backdrops for change”, It’s Nice That, 31 May 2013). Columns, a hall of arcades, industrial posts and beams, wide stairways and building plans - the apparatus of traffic control in public spaces - are illustrated from varying vantage points in the present work. As esteemed critic and curator Franklin Sirmans noted of Mehretu’s work in a review for The New York Times: “Her action-packed scenes of virtual cities incorporate classical examples of architecture with a psychogeography that collapses time – from the prehistoric to the present – to create a dreamy yet eerily grounded picture of contemporary life. In the painting Rise of the New Suprematists, groups of small marks identify a determined procession of people in an environment suggestive of urban development on a sprawling global scale.” (Franklin Sirmans, “Mapping a New, and Urgent, History of the World,” The New York Times, December 9, 2001, p. 41). As Douglas Fogle has observed, Mehretu’s ability to entwine real and imaginary topographies ultimately casts her work as a new kind of history painting. ‘Her paintings ... do not rely on the recognizable but on evocative shards of graphic iconography,’ he writes. ‘She shows us a vision of history as though told through the fractured prism of a Robbe-Grillet novel or projected into a painterly version of the computer game Sim City’ (Douglas Fogle, ‘Putting the World into the World’, in Douglas Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi, Eds., Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, Minneapolis 2003, p. 5).

Conceiving of her work in globalised terms, Mehretu draws from diverse historical movements as well as her own disparate heritage when constructing her fragmented cityscapes. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, and now based between New York and Berlin, her paintings are built from the juxtaposition of different styles of marking, each with their own character, identity and history. In Rise of the New Suprematists, Mehretu underlines her canonical lineage to Kazimir Malevich and Lyubov Popova, referring to their manifesto declaring the supremacy of pure artistic feeling over the literal depiction of objects. The linear vectors that propel the eye outwards also reference the dynamic explorations of motion that characterise the Italian Futurists’ urban celebrations of modernity, while the overlapping streaks and smudges recall the schismatic personal expression of Cy Twombly, and, when viewed from a distance, the composition as a whole echoes the graphic power of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic Pop explosions. Evincing Mehretu’s artistic genius, these deeply discordant sources are filtered through her own cultural consciousness and meticulous approach, harmonising into a uniquely resonant style of history painting, updated for the modern age.

At once daunting and mesmerising, like an epic poem or the teeminging pictorial surface of a Baroque fresco, Mehretu’s Untitled is an expansive compendium of coalescing geometric forms and art historical references that theatrically embodies the chaos of contemporary life. Like an ever evolving cypher that subtly shifts and changes at every turn, entire histories and future possibilities collide and reform anew within the artist’s precisely imagined universe. Building upon studies of army terrain maps, NFL game plans, airport diagrams and construction blueprints, Mehretu’s painting offers a new language of abstraction as a way of articulating the inherent paradox of order and disorder that defines the complex nature of our shared experience.

朱 莉・梅赫雷圖於 2001 年創作的不朽傑作《無題》以古代文明和未來帝國的碎片組成喧囂結構，是雄心勃勃的重要作品。在本作中，狂熱的筆觸相互交織。這些筆觸似乎從構圖的未知點浮現，然後又巧妙地融入整體。透過疊加的層次、脆弱的線條以及光學色彩的運用，作品呈現出巨大的規模和深度。觀者彷彿置身於建築、歷史和空間交織的綜合體驗中，令人著迷不已。這些輪廓形式的抽象與具象並存，同時向前推進與向後退縮。《無題》透過爆炸性地綜合抽象象形文字符號和建築視覺詞彙，重新詮釋公共空間的概念。梅赫雷圖以抽象的政治為目標，建構出一幅引人注目的地圖，喚起觀者對地圖集插圖、建築組合、華麗欄杆和天氣圖的聯想。這些空間的圖形探索試圖闡明當代城市景觀的權力結構和地圖製作方法，同時亦反映藝術家自身在其中的位置。正如本作所展現，藝術家的嚴肅概念和靈巧技巧使她成為一位現代大師，以及在對社會、文化和政治持謹慎態度的一代中，一把明確表達意見的獨特聲音。

《無題》在 2002 年獲選入第八屆波羅的海國際藝術三年展，以及同年的〈Casino 2001: 1st Quadriennale voor Hedendaagse Kunst〉展覽，足證其重要性和卓越水平。梅赫雷圖的畫作一直以黑白為主。直至大約 2000 年左右，色彩鮮艷的流線型形狀開始主導作品。她被廣泛認為是一代最舉重輕重的藝術家之一。她的作品在2001年至2004年間引起廣泛關注，目前被多間頂尖機構收錄為館藏，包括紐約現代藝術博物館、匹茲堡卡內基藝術博物館和阿肯色州本頓維水晶橋美國藝術博物館。梅赫雷圖在2015年獲得美國國務院藝術獎章。她的中期職業生涯回顧展分別於2019年在洛杉磯縣藝術博物館和2021年在惠特尼美國藝術博物館舉行。這兩個展覽提供迄今對其創作的最全面概述，並探索抽象、建築、景觀和尺度在她作品中所體現的可能性和範疇。

自 90 年代末以來，梅赫雷圖開始運用建築圖紙、地形地圖和建築藍圖作為抽象語彙中的形式和概念工具。這種創作方式產生出一種複雜的視覺詞彙，並根植於社會、歷史和地理評論中，探討全球人口流動、動員的軍隊、城市地圖和結構規劃等議題。梅赫雷圖曾表示：「我不認為建築語言僅僅是關於空間的比喻，更是關於權力的空間與概念。」（梅赫雷圖，摘自Rob Alderson〈Artist Julie Mehretu explores how cities serve as backdrops for change〉，《It's Nice That》，2013 年 5 月 31 日。」本作以多個不同視角描繪公共空間內的交通控制設施，包括柱子、拱廊大廳、工業柱樑、寬敞樓梯和建築平面圖等。 正如備受尊敬的評論家和策展人Franklin Sirmans在《紐約時報》的評論中所指出的一樣：「梅赫雷圖的作品充滿動感的虛擬城市場景，融合古典建築的經典示例和心理地理學。她將時間從史前時代到現在壓縮在一起，創造出一幅夢幻而又怪異地扎根於當代生活的圖畫。」在畫作《新至上主義者的興起》中，一組組小標記象徵堅定地行進的人群，而這個環境則暗示一個廣大的全球城市發展。（Franklin Sirmans，摘自〈 Mapping a New, and Urgent, History of the World〉，《紐約時報》，2001 年 12 月 9 日，頁 41 ） 一如 Douglas Fogle 所觀察，梅赫雷圖將現實和想像的地形交織在一起，使得其作品被定位為一種新型歷史畫。他寫道：「她的畫作不依賴於可辨識的事物，而是依靠引人聯想的圖形符號碎片。她向我們展示的歷史彷彿是霍格里耶小說的破碎棱鏡，或畫家版本的電腦遊戲《模擬城市》。」（Douglas Fogle，摘自〈Putting the World into the World〉，Douglas Fogle 和 Olukemi Ilesanmi 編，〈Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting 〉，明尼阿波利斯，2003 年，頁5 ）

梅赫雷圖從各種歷史運動以及自身不同的文化遺產中汲取靈感，來建構她的碎片化城市景觀，同時將作品構思為全球化術語。梅赫雷圖生於埃塞俄比亞，成長於密歇根州，並在塞內加爾和羅德島接受教育。如今，她穿梭於紐約和柏林之間。梅赫雷圖的畫作以不同風格的標記為基礎，每個風格均有其特色、身份和歷史。在《新至上主義者的興起》一書中，藝術家強調她與卡茲米爾·馬列維奇和柳博夫·波波娃的思想相承。這些思想宣稱純粹藝術超越對物體的字面描繪﹐感覺至高無上。這些線性向量圖形推動眼睛向外，同時也參考意大利未來主義者對運動的動態探索，展現現代城市慶典的特色，而重疊的筆觸和污漬則讓人聯想到塞·托姆布雷的分裂個人表達。當從遠處觀看時，整個構圖呼應了羅伊・李奇登斯坦羅伊漫畫式普普爆炸的圖形力量。這些深深不和諧的來源透過梅赫雷圖自身的文化意識和細緻方法過濾，展現她的藝術天賦。她將這些來源融合成一種獨特而富共鳴的歷史繪畫風格，為其加入現代色彩。

梅赫雷圖的《無題》確實迷人又令人生畏，就像一首史詩詩歌或巴洛克壁畫的豐富圖像表面。本作是一個廣闊的綜合體，結合幾何形式和藝術歷史參考，戲劇性地體現當代生活的混亂。其作品就像不斷演變的密碼，每個轉折處都微妙地變化，展示整個歷史和未來可能性在其精確想象的宇宙中不斷碰撞和重新形成的過程。梅赫雷圖的畫作借鑒軍事地形圖、國家美式足球聯盟NFL的比賽戰術、機場示意圖和建築藍圖的研究，以一種全新的抽象語言來表達秩序和混亂的固有矛盾，從而定義我們共同經歷的複雜本質。