Julie Mehretu’s new series Grey Area, now up at the Guggenheim, is a diary to place, the inevitability of it shaping you, and in this case, the work that comes out of it. When initially granted a commission by Deutsche Bank Series and Guggenheim in 2007, Mehretu proposed six large-scale paintings, each dedicated to urban centers around the globe. This is, of course, was before she arrived in Berlin and the shadow of the city crept into her studio, before she worked through a German winter. She gradually lost the global theme and narrowed her scope to Berlin, its history, phantoms, cityscapes and war bunkers. Within that theme, an abandonment occurred, a shift in the paintings, that mirrors the passing of time. Shapes collapsing into lines, the typical spunk and punch of Mehretu’s work, the noise upon noise upon noise, transferring into a half notes – less paint, more ink, fragments, erasure, after-shocks, schizophrenic repetitions of interiors. And as the name of the show suggests, the loss of color, and a predominant use of grey.