ExhibitionsJulie Mehretu
Past Exhibition

Julie Mehretu

October 24, 2020 – January 31, 2021

Julie Mehretu, co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, is the artist’s first comprehensive survey exhibition featuring her meticulously crafted paintings, drawings, and prints. Including early work influenced by the notion of cities as sociopolitical constructs; complex paintings built up in layers of colors, lines, brushstrokes, and architectural renderings; and Mehretu’s recent predominantly abstract, gestural work, the exhibition reveals the evolution of her work and its proximity to abstraction over the past two decades.

Banner image credit: Julie Mehretu (American, born Ethiopia, 1970), Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts): Part 2 (detail), 2012, ink and acrylic on canvas; Julie Mehretu (American, born Ethiopia, 1970), Hineni (E. 3:4) (detail), 2018, ink and acrylic on canvas.

Untitled (two), 1996

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Untitled (two), 1996
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Private collectionIn this early painting, Mehretu explored how to represent the cumulative effect of time by layering materials. Here, she embedded her “character map” drawings—composed of tiny glyphic characters clustered in formations that resemble the geological contours and pathways of a map—between strata of poured paint. The result approximates the creation of a fossilized topography.

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Untitled, 2000

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

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Stadia II, 2004

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Stadia II, 2004
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquistion Endowment FundIn Stadia II, Mehretu calls upon sports and military typologies to disrupt and interrogate modern conceptions of leisure, labor, and order. For Mehretu, public spaces such as coliseums, amphitheaters, and stadiums represent an underlying disorder and violence in systems and structures that otherwise seem orderly and rational. Stadia II is filled with curved lines and an array of pageantry including flags, banners, lights, and seating, which calls attention to the ways in which spectacles in contemporary culture, including championship games such as the Super Bowl and wars with marquee names such as the War on Terror, are connected to imperialism, patriarchy, and power.

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Black City, 2007

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.

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Berliner Plätze, 2009

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Berliner Plätze, 2009
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Deutsche Guggenheim, BerlinWhile living in Germany in 2008, Mehretu grew increasingly critical of American foreign policy, particularly the Iraq War and the War on Terror. In Berlin, she was surrounded by visible scars of the Holocaust and the Cold War, which pushed her to question her role as an American who opposed the war but nonetheless felt responsible for the terrors inflicted on Iraqi civilians and spaces. Seeking to develop a counternarrative, she began to incorporate techniques of erasure, opacity, and overwriting into her art practice. In Berliner Plätze, drawings of buildings mostly eradicated by bombings during World War II form a hazy gray field.

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Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts), 2012

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.

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Being Higher II, 2013

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Being Higher II, 2013
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Susan and Larry Marx, Aspen, Courtesy of Neal Meltzer Fine Art, New YorkIn 2013, Mehretu became deeply affected by the Syrian civil war, the spread of the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. She began to move away from architectural drawing and toward a more gestural mode of mark making to further explore violence, resistance, and struggle in her work. For the first time, she incorporated human-scale figures into her compositions, began to work with new tools, and used her bare hands to push and pull paint across the surface of the canvas. She produced Being Higher II in a one-to-one scale with her body, which seems to coalesce through a convergence of gestural marks made by swiping, striking, and scraping the canvas.

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Untitled, 2014

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

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Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson, 2016

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson, 2016
Ink and acrylic on canvas
The Broad Art FoundationAs its title suggests, Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson links disembodied anatomy with a site of violence and political strife. This painting began with a blurred photograph of an unarmed man with his hands up facing a group of police officers in riot gear, which was taken during the protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Mehretu layered color over a blurry, sanded, black-and-gray background: fuchsia and peachy-pink areas rise from below while toxic green tones float above, like distant skies drawing near. Outlines of eyes, buttocks, and other body parts appear within the graffiti-like marks and black blots hovering over smoky areas, suggesting human activity obscured.

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Epigraph, Damascus, 2016

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.”

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Haka (and Riot), 2019

Julie Mehretu
American, born Ethiopia, 1970
Haka (and Riot), 2019
Ink and acrylic on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Andy SongFor this diptych, Mehretu began with photographs taken inside detention facilities in Texas and California where undocumented migrant children have been detained. She blurred and abstracted these images with layer upon layer of digital and physical drawing, painting, airbrushing, and screenprinting, creating a distorted space filled with voids resembling sunken eyes, skulls, and orifices. These cavities seem to coalesce into a powerful, colossal form that suggests exorcism or a dancer performing the haka, a Māori war dance.

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Hineni (E. 3:4), 2018

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.

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As I continue drawing, I find myself more and more interested in the idea that drawing can be an activist gesture. That drawing — as an informed, intuitive process, a process that is representative of individual agency and culture, a very personal process — offers something radical.

Julie Mehretu

Biography

Julie Mehretu headshot.

Julie Mehretu. Photo: Teju Cole
Julie Mehretu (American, born Ethiopia, 1970) emigrated as a child to the United States from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. Now based in Harlem, New York, she is best known for large-scale abstract paintings layered with a variety of mediums, marks, and meanings. These canvases and works on paper refer to the history of art, architecture, and past civilizations while addressing the most immediate conditions of our contemporary moment, including migration, revolution, climate change, global capitalism, and technology.

Mehretu begins a painting by drawing on the prepared canvas, not unlike the Old Master technique of starting off with a preparatory underdrawing. She then develops the works by incorporating various techniques such as printing, digital collage, erasure, and unconstrained gesture. She is inspired by a variety of sources, from cave paintings, cartography, and Chinese calligraphy to architectural renderings, graffiti, and photojournalism. Drawing on this vast archive, she explores how realities of the past and present can shape human consciousness. Her visual language represents, she says, how “history is made: one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else from the same thing.”
Mehretu’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including Documenta XIII (2012), the Whitney Biennial (2004), the Carnegie International (2004), and the Istanbul Biennial (2003). Among her many awards are the National Medal of Arts (2015), the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award (2013), the Berlin Prize (2007), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2005). This year Mehretu was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2020.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Major support is provided by the Ford Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This exhibition is made possible by

Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor

Exhibition Series Sponsor

Premier Exhibition Series Supporters

The Antinori Foundation
Sarah and Jim Kennedy
Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot

Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters

Anne Cox Chambers Foundation
Robin and Hilton Howell

Ambassador Exhibition Supporter

Rod and Kelly Westmoreland

Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters

Farideh and Al Azadi
The Ron and Lisa Brill Family Charitable Trust
Lucinda W. Bunnen
Marcia and John Donnell
W. Daniel Ebersole and Sarah Eby-Ebersole
Karen T. & Jeb L. Hughes, Corporate Environments
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones
Joel Knox and Joan Marmo
Margot and Danny McCaul

Generous support is also provided by

Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, Isobel Anne Fraser–Nancy Fraser Parker Exhibition Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, and the RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund.