Julie Mehretu’s edition for “Texte zur Kunst” presents a study in mark-making, an exercise in which our very understanding of how and what a line performs, is ultimately altered, as is often the case in Mehretu’s work. To many, Mehretu, who has participated in documenta, the Whitney Biennial, and many other international exhibitions, will be familiar through her often large-scale paintings, dense and at the same time permeable fields of superimposed marks; thickets of lineaments. Frequently the graphic elements that make up these works derive from the visual representations and maps by which we chart the material orders that arrange our communities – architecture, cities, streets.

In the present work, Mehretu no longer extrapolates her forms from such representational and organizational tasks. Rather, she creates what could be called a community of lines. Fine straights reminiscent of vector graphics, feathery marks that recall the hairs of wheat or the wings of birds, curves and semicircles create a zone in which line generates space, inscribes surfaces, traverses other lines, and even produces a delicate palette of white, blue, gray, and brown. This field is surrounded by a white border, a negative cache where all tracing breaks off into blankness. The sheet on which these lines must have been positioned before printing originally ended here, or it extended the field which we now see, but has been cut. This faintest of cliffs now manifests itself in the print of this edition as the edge at which all lines disappear.