At the onset of a millennium defined by globalization, Julie Mehretu has created a new form of history painting whose themes include identity, cultural history, geography, and personal narrative. She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in East Lansing, Michigan, educated in Rhode Island and Senegal, and has lived off and on in both New York City and Berlin. Her life experience is reflected in her visual vocabulary, which is drawn from maps, urban-planning grids, and architectural forms. These are combined to make dynamic, delicate paintings, drawings, and prints that blur the line between abstraction and figuration. Descended from historical movements such as Futurism and Suprematism, which imagined a link between utopian social structures and non-objective art, Mehretu’s art embodies the interconnected and complex character of a world that seems, at times, to be spinning out of control.
Painting process, Babel Unleashed
Mehretu’s paintings are constructed through a labor-intensive additive process in which successive layers of lines and thick streams of paint are separated by coats of transparent acrylic. As she works, the surfaces build up into stratified geologies in which individual images, which she refers to as characters, are embedded like fossils. Babel Unleashed (2001), for example, is a jumble of shapes, marks, and colors that suggest a Renaissance painting whose ordered, illusionistic space has been taken apart and violently reshuffled. Its characters range from renderings of airports, stadiums, and public plazas to delicate depictions of fires and explosions. The title, which refers to the Tower of Babel, suggests that the painting offers a vision of a world in which ethnic conflicts continue to shatter communities across the globe.
Transcending: The New International
Babel Unleashed was included in Mehretu’s 2003 solo exhibition at the Walker, an early recognition of her work that she still considers an important marker for her career. The show also included the monumental canvas Transcending: The New International (2003). Rendered in layers of black India ink and acrylic, the painting has as its underlying structure the city plans of the major economic and political capitals in Africa. On its surface, she made complex line drawings of indigenous, colonial, and modernist architecture in the postcolonial period. Design schematics for a city plaza in Abuja, Nigeria, for example, are submerged under a flurry of characters that stage battles, form alliances, and ravage plans for the urban gathering space. Although the painting refers to the derailed promises of African independence, it is more fundamentally a hopeful speculation on the futures of the real and imagined locations it depicts. Like all her paintings, this one speaks not only to the tragic aspects of history but also to its moments of liberation and freedom.
Printmaking
Mehretu’s interest in layered imagery lends itself naturally to printmaking. She has explored lithography, screen printing, chine collé, intaglio, drypoint, engraving, aquatint, and spit-bite techniques in projects at several studios in the U.S. and Europe. Entropia (review) (2004) and the related Entropia: Construction (2005), made at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, are cartographic constructions of color and line that suggest imagined territories in which chaos reigns. The more stately black-and-white Auguries (2010), made at Gemini G.E.L. on Los Angeles, is a grid of 12 etchings that, at 15 feet long, rivals her paintings in scale and impact.
Recognition
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). In 2006, her work was explored in a major survey organized by MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León, Spain. Among her awards are the National Medal of Arts (2015), the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award (2013), the Berlin Prize (2007), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2005).
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