{"data":{"id":"9260","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":9260,"topgoose_id":1418,"tms_id":9260,"display_name":"Julie Mehretu","sort_name":"Mehretu Julie","display_date":"1970–","begin_date":"1970","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eJulie Mehretu has been known since the late 1990s for her large-scale, dynamic paintings that capture the chaos and flux of urban experience, globalization, and contemporary politics. Her distinctive cartographic vocabulary derives from a wide range of sources, including maps, diagrams, and photographs; history and mural painting; and the abstractions of the historical avant-garde. Although influenced by her own migration—from Addis Ababa to New York, by way of Senegal, Michigan, Texas, and Rhode Island—Mehretu’s work does not represent specific locations but rather takes up the radical possibilities of abstraction. Through a palimpsest of diverse imagery, perspective, and scale, she creates what she has described as “spaces of subterfuge, control, and power turning in on themselves.”\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMehretu builds up the luminous depth of her paintings using ink, pigment, and thin acrylic sheets that are overlayed and sanded down. With \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/41990\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eUntitled\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, her first formal edition, Mehretu tackled the problem of achieving this effect in the medium of print. Working with master printer Gregory Burnet, she employed a complex range of techniques, including etched lines and chine-collé, which allowed her to embed and superimpose imagery in thin layers of paper. The resulting composition suggests the intercirculation of populations, natural forces, and the built environment. Clusters of curving lines swirl around an architectonic knot, where the central, perspectival recession is disrupted by scattered structures and colored ribbons. The techniques of layering and image making demanded by print have prompted innovation in subsequent drawings and paintings; as Mehretu has explained, it is “in the printmaking that new things are invented.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, \u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 262.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500122539","wikidata_id":"Q447568","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:23:31.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-28T07:03:12.988-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/9260/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/9260/exhibitions"}}}}