Julie Mehretu
1970–

Julie 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.”

Mehretu builds up the luminous depth of her paintings using ink, pigment, and thin acrylic sheets that are overlayed and sanded down. With Untitled, 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.”

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 262.

Introduction

Julie Mehretu (born November 28, 1970) is an Ethiopian American contemporary visual artist, known for her multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes on a large scale. Her paintings, drawings, and prints depict the cumulative effects of urban sociopolitical changes.

Mehretu is included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020. The following year, The New York Times described her as a "rare example of a contemporary Black female painter who has already entered the canon."

In October 2023, Mehretu broke the auction record for an African artist at Sotheby's Hong Kong, with her piece Untitled (2001), which sold for $9.32 million.

In 2023, she was one of two women artists whose work was among the top ten in contemporary auction sale price.