Julie Mehretu
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→ Julie Mehretu" (2020, Prestel Publishing) – Edited by Rujeko Hockley
→ Drawings and Monotypes" (2023, Kettle’s Yard) – Edited by Andrew Nairne and Amy Tobin.
→ Julie Mehretu" (2024, Marsilio Arte) – Edited by Caroline Bourgeois.
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→ "They departed for their own country another way (a 9x9x9 hauntology)" – 2023, White Cube, London
→ "Ensemble" – 2024, Palazzo Grassi, Venice
→ "Julie Mehretu" – 2022, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
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Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to an American mother and Ethiopian father. In 1977 she immigrated with her family to Michigan. She studied at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal, and received a BA in art from Kalamazoo College, Michigan, before earning an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Mehretu creates mesmerizing, large-scale paintings, drawings, and prints featuring nonrepresentational forms layered with familiar architectural imagery. Inspired by a multitude of sources, including archival photographs, urban planning grids, comics, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, graffiti, and modernist art and architecture, her semiabstract works explore how power, history, dystopia, and the built environment intersect and impact the formation of personal and communal identities. Her oeuvre engages with the tradition of nonobjective painting, from Futurism to Constructivism to Abstract Expressionism, and examines the relationship between abstraction and utopian ideals. Mehretu typically creates a substructure for her canvases by covering a gesso base with wire-frame architectural drawings, overlapping zones of flat color, or clouds of pigment. These initial layers guide the narratives that unfold through subsequent additions of ink and acrylic paint. She separates many of these coats with a thin film of acrylic medium, sanded to produce a polished, transparent stratum. Lastly, on the surface of the paintings she makes spontaneous, gestural marks resembling shifting air masses, diagrams of weather patterns, or schematic representations of individuals and communities as they assemble and engage in dialogue or debate. In works such as Congress (2003) and Middle Grey (2007–09), she harnessed these techniques to suggest forces of energy, action, and intent. In her paintings Conjured Parts (2016–17), Mehretu turned to news photography of natural disasters, protests, and political events, blurring these images to the point of illegibility and using them as the basis for compositions with looser, more gestural markings and billowing areas of pigment compared to her earlier works. She continues to use abstraction to investigate the sites, structures, and bodies where social, economic, and political activity unfold.