Julie Mehretu
Ethiopian, b. 1970

Stadia II, 2004.
Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

 

 

Stadia II, a painting from a series of three, fills its canvas with abstraction of color, line, and movement. Mehretu uses ink and acrylic to create a variety of lines, allowing some lines to be bolded by form and color and some to appear, as Mehretu explains, as fossils. Mehretu considers her paintings “psycho-geographies,” where exist a dichotomy of natural and man-made elements. In Stadia II, bright colors that represent flags and lights of a stadium accompany darker, “fossil-like” lines and natural colors (like the beige canvas itself) that resemble soil or ground on which the man-made objects stand. One interpretation may highlight that the contrast of the dulled lines and indistinct forms with the bright colors and bold forms suggest that, as the urban landscape consumes the resource from nature, the natural landscape falls dull. Like Abdalouye Konate’s Homme Nature II, Stadia II can give light to the human impact on the environment.

Dylan Bess ’22
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