Julie Mehretu, Retopistics: A Renegade Evacuation, 2001. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. © Julie Mehretu, photo: Erma Estwick.
In the fall of 2021, the Walker Art Center will be the final stop on a national tour of the exhibition Julie Mehretu, the first-ever comprehensive retrospective on the artist’s work. Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; lives and works in New York) is best known for her large-scale abstract paintings that are densely layered with mediums, marks, and meanings. Her canvases and works on paper reference the histories of art and architecture, colonialism, and past civilizations while addressing some of the most immediate conditions of our contemporary moment, including geopolitics; war; revolution and global uprising; climate change; capitalism; racial injustice; and diaspora and displacement.
Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition features more than 75 drawings, paintings, and prints made from 1996 to the present. It covers a broad arc of Mehretu’s artistic evolution, revealing her early focus on drawing, graphics, and mapping and her more recent introduction of bold gestures, sweeps of saturated color, and figurative elements into her immersive, large-scale works.
Mehretu’s paintings begin with drawing; she then develops the works by incorporating techniques such as printing, digital collage, erasure, and painterly abstraction. She is inspired by a variety of sources, from cave paintings, cartography, Chinese calligraphy, and 17th-century landscape etchings to architectural renderings, graffiti, and news photography. Drawing on this vast archive, Mehretu explores how realities of the past and present can shape human consciousness. As the artist says, her visual language represents how “history is made: one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else from the same thing.”
The Minneapolis presentation marks a homecoming of sorts for Mehretu, who had her first museum residency and exhibition at the Walker in 2003. Several major works in the current exhibition are drawn from the Walker’s collection. Walker Executive Director Mary Ceruti notes, “With our long and meaningful history with Julie Mehretu and her work, we are absolutely thrilled to be bringing this exhibition to Minneapolis to share with Twin Cities audiences.”
Julie Mehretu is co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Curators: Christine Y. Kim, curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; with Rujeko Hockley, Arnhold Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Walker’s presentation is coordinated by Siri Engberg, senior curator and director of Visual Arts.
Exhibition Tour
LACMA, Los Angeles: November 3, 2019–September 7, 2020
High Museum of Art, Atlanta: October 24, 2020–January 31, 2021
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: March 19–August 8, 2021
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: October 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
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