Three Artists: Julie Mehretu, Wayne Gonzales, Julian Lethbridge

John Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring work by Julie Mehretu, Julian Lethbridge, and Wayne Gonzales on view from February 3 to March 5, 2011. A preview will be held on Thursday, February 3rd from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Working from an archive of map clippings, newspapers, and banal outlines to elaborate city plans, and diagrams of war and historical destruction, Julie Mehretu's paintings and prints attempt to make sense of what happens when these designs interact. Mehretu abstracts these organizational tools while abridging their histories to create new narratives that she describes as "story maps of no location." With a cacophonous overlay of markings, her work captures and concentrates the dynamism and fluidity of various times and places.

Wayne Gonzales works between representation and abstraction, accumulating images from the internet and recasting them with a painter's hand. Gonzales' low-resolution, grey-scale paintings disrupt preconceived notions and permitting the viewer to develop their own interpretation of an image.

Employing luminous oil paints and pigment sticks, Julian Lethbridge builds up the canvas layer upon layer, creating rich, textural, and rhythmic images. Using a grid or other rough template, Lethbridge creates underlying system of stability on which he can make gestural strokes. The sequence of more varied forms demonstrates the artist's interest in the repetition and inherent beauty of natural phenomena. The result is a meditative observation, both on the modernist grid and the organic interplay of surface, color, and depth.