White Cube Bermondsey shows an exhibition by Julie Mehretu. This is Mehretu’s first major solo exhibition in London and will feature new and recent paintings, some of which will be presented within a specially constructed environment designed by David Adjaye in close collaboration with the artist.

This exhibition, which features five new works, centres around ‘Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts’, the collective name for four monumental canvases that were recently included in dOCUMENTA (13). The ‘Mogamma’ works, which were completed in 2012 shortly after the time of the Arab Spring revolutions, have evolved out of Mehretu’s investigations into how architecture and geographical space, particularly within urban centres, become sites for political and mythological projection.

The title of these works relates to ‘Al-Mogamma’, the name of the all purpose government building in Tahrir Square, Cairo which was both instrumental in the 2011 revolution and architecturally symptomatic of Egypt’s post-colonial past. The word ‘Mogamma’, however, means ‘collective’ in Arabic and historically, has been used to refer to a place that shares a mosque, a synagogue and a church and is a place of multi faith.

An exhibition of Mehretu’s new paintings will run concurrently at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. A catalogue for ‘Liminal Squared’, with colour reproductions and essays by TJ Demos and Tacita Dean, will be published this summer on the occasion of the joint exhibitions.

http://whitecube.com