Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Untitled, 2000
Ink, colored pencil, and cut paper on Mylar
Private collection
© Julie Mehretu, photograph by Cathy Carver

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Black City, 2007
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Pinault Collection, Paris, FranceIn Black City, an isometric rendering of a modern city projects an array of static rectangular volumes. Their order is disturbed by clusters of gestural marks, graphic symbols including the five-pointed star, geometric planes of color, and lines of differing weights and colors. The stars allude both to the symbol of rank for US military generals and to sports logos. Mehretu merges the visual language of signs used in the military and in organized sports to critique modern concepts of leisure, labor, and social order. The cloud-like accumulations of gradient marks, which resemble the murmurations of birds, suggest upheaval, chaos, and disarray.

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts), 2012
installation view in Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012
Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and White Cube
© Julie Mehretu, photograph by Ryszard KasiewiczThe 2011 Egyptian revolution—part of the “Arab Spring” of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa—was a major inspiration for this four-part cycle of paintings. Mogamma is named after an Egyptian government administrative building on Tahrir Square that was seen as a symbol of modernism and the country’s liberation from colonial occupation when it was first built in 1949. It was later associated with government corruption and bureaucracy before eventually serving as the backdrop to a revolutionary site.Mehretu began work on these four vertical canvases by exploring the densely layered environment of Tahrir Square, where a dizzying array of architectures, including structures built in Mamluk, Islamic, European, and Cold War styles, coexist. She created a web of drawings that conflate the Brutalist architectural style of the Mogamma with details from other public squares associated with the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring, such as the amphitheater stairs and spiraling lights of Meskel Square in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the midcentury high-rise buildings surrounding Zuccotti Park in New York. She also integrated drawings of globally iconic sites of public protest and change, such as Red Square in Moscow, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, and Firdos Square in Baghdad, among others. The High Museum of Art owns Part 2. This touring exhibition marks the first time the four paintings have been reunited since 2012.

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Untitled, 2014
Ink on paper
Private collection
© Julie Mehretu, photograph by Berndt Borchard

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Epigraph, Damascus, 2016
Photogravure, sugar-lift aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, and open bite on six panels
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Kelvin Davis and Hana Kim through the 2018 Collectors CommitteeEpigraph, Damascus is a major achievement in printmaking for Mehretu, representing a new integration of architectural drawings and paintings overlaid with a dense array of marks. Working closely with Copenhagen-based master printer Niels Borch Jensen, Mehretu used photogravure, a technique from the 1800s that fuses photography with etching. She built the foundation of the print on a blurred photograph layered with hand-drawn images of buildings in Damascus, Syria, composited with a layer of gestural marks made on large sheets of Mylar. On a second plate, she executed her characteristic variety of light-handed brushstrokes while innovatively using techniques known as aquatint and open bite. Describing the interplay of architectural details and mark making in this work, she says, “You have the skeleton of the ghosts of Damascus, and then you have the blur, the haze, or breakdown of the ongoing civil war.”

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Hineni (E. 3:4), 2018
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Don de George Economou, 2019, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielleMehertu based Hineni (E. 3:4) on an image of the 2017 Northern California wildfires while also alluding to the Rohingya burnings in Myanmar as part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign. The word hineni translates to “here I am” in Hebrew, which was Moses’s response to Yahweh (God), who called his name from within the burning bush to tell him he would lead the Israelites in the Exodus to the promised land. By interrogating three types of fires in this painting—one environmental, one intentional, one prophetic—Mehretu explores the contradictory meanings of a single elemental force.