![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Archive/Duke-Street/2002/Julie-Mehretu/Julie-Mehretu-Renegade-Delirium-2002-high-res.jpg?w=960&h=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1707734100&s=ecee915bad7f931b3f56bd5d9fcf9727 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Archive/Duke-Street/2002/Julie-Mehretu/Julie-Mehretu-Renegade-Delirium-2002-high-res.jpg?w=1280&h=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1707734100&s=f048a593bfdcf42dad607d0e0b01992d 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Archive/Duke-Street/2002/Julie-Mehretu/Julie-Mehretu-Renegade-Delirium-2002-high-res.jpg?w=1600&h=1200&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1707734100&s=b400f199469e6a8e192e9f5ee551a8b2 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Exhibitions/Gallery-Exhibitions/Archive/Duke-Street/2002/Julie-Mehretu/Julie-Mehretu-Renegade-Delirium-2002-high-res.jpg?w=2268&h=1701&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1707734100&s=74fb37882c9c4d33f93a7a8550de74c1 2268w)
Renegade Delirium
Julie Mehretu
Renegade Delirium
3 July – 14 September 2002
Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, ultra dynamic paintings built up on canvas through a complicated series of acrylic layers overlaid with explorative, frenetic mark-making: a combination of delicate, almost filigree ink lines and thick, streams of coloured paint.
Mehretu’s main source of subject matter is the city and its architecture, and more particularly, the dense, accelerated and compressed urban environments of the present century. Her canvases, including Renegade Delirium (2002), overlay different architectural features and geographical elements—columns, porticoes, building plans, city maps—that are all seen from many viewpoints: aerial, isometric and cross-section. Mixed together, these fragments form imploded and chaotic images that seem driven by an internal force, their explosive lines of colour and urgent marks spreading over the canvas from a central, energetic core. Any notion of scale or perspective is lost, leaving the viewer confronted by a semi-abstract picture that incorporates a confounding series of transparent strata: a kind of unpeeling of the layers that make-up a city itself, a way of travelling through time, of experiencing different historical moments all at once.
The artist has lived in Ethiopia, Michigan, Texas, and in New York, but despite her personal experience of different cities, she sees her work as more experiential than location-specific, describing her canvases as ‘story maps of no location’. In this sense, the artist’s work relates more to the viewer’s imagination than to any definable reality. Seen through its cacophony of images it represents the speed of the modern city itself. As Laura Hoptman has commented: Mehretu’s works ‘are hybrids of all those cities that we have inculcated, whether by actual contact or by second-hand experience through television, film or books, as well as hybrids of all those cities we have yet to absorb.’
Installation View
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/imported-exhibition-images/julie-mehretu-renegade-delirium-white-cube-st-jamess-london-2-july-14-september-2002-medium-res.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1677875706&s=f80636cd2d84e3dcaf8ee360e94fa28b 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/imported-exhibition-images/julie-mehretu-renegade-delirium-white-cube-st-jamess-london-2-july-14-september-2002-medium-res.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1677875706&s=327dfd8640196d462c56c901af094fd0 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/imported-exhibition-images/julie-mehretu-renegade-delirium-white-cube-st-jamess-london-2-july-14-september-2002-medium-res.jpg?w=1200&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1677875706&s=f7975913850a19fd680ce92cbbd1ee6d 1200w)
![](https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Headers/Artist-Pages/Julie-Mehretu-Hineni-E-34-2018.jpg?w=720&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1682415451&s=ab1f015a08c3ab48fbe319be5dcee6b9 720w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Headers/Artist-Pages/Julie-Mehretu-Hineni-E-34-2018.jpg?w=960&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1682415451&s=8fe082423713995bbcbb9c30ae1c03f4 960w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Headers/Artist-Pages/Julie-Mehretu-Hineni-E-34-2018.jpg?w=1280&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1682415451&s=48503f629168a41450a1c7afa59751cc 1280w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Headers/Artist-Pages/Julie-Mehretu-Hineni-E-34-2018.jpg?w=1600&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1682415451&s=5adf4129acae56fe2f629cfba1485a3f 1600w, https://white-cube.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/uploads/Headers/Artist-Pages/Julie-Mehretu-Hineni-E-34-2018.jpg?w=2142&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1682415451&s=ad205c8e599c10f21d46bd6068dad9d6 2142w)
Julie Mehretu
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