Julie Mehretu made Empirical Construction, Istanbul to show at the Istanbul Biennial in 2003. She has called it a “portrait of a city,” and the painting pays homage to the Turkish cosmopolis that straddles Europe and Asia across the Bosporus Strait, but it is nowhere pictured as a place. Rather, traces and fragments of images are overlaid into a dynamic visual vortex. Intermixing the city’s past, present, and future, delicate outlines lifted from 360-degree panoramic photographs that Mehretu took of the Old City from the top of the medieval Galata Tower, and from blueprints for the city’s modernization, appear along with colored planes that evoke urban architectural forms. Angled and arching lines shoot across the canvas away from the center, the point of lowest density, where the ghostly skeleton of the cityscape can be discerned.

Source: Julie Mehretu | MoMA