Julie Mehretu
The Ethiopian-American painter who layers architectural blueprints, urban maps, and gestural marks into large-scale works that treat the built world as a record of political force.
Julie Mehretu works at a scale that makes the viewer aware of the wall. Her paintings — often spanning several metres — build up through a process of architectural drafting and subsequent gestural erasure: she draws city plans and building sections, then overlays them with explosive marks until the legible system beneath becomes a contested ground. The result is abstraction that carries the weight of real urban and political history.
Addis Ababa, Michigan, and an Atlantic formation
Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa on 28 November 1970. Her family moved to Michigan when she was seven after her father, an economics professor, took a position at Michigan State University. She completed her undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College and studied in Dakar at the Cheikh Anta Diop University for a year before entering the MFA programme at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1997.
The exposure to Senegalese urbanism and the experience of being an Ethiopian-born American who came of age in the American Midwest are both legible, if abstracted, in her work's preoccupation with the geometries through which cities absorb and displace their populations.
Method and materials
Mehretu's process is layered and slow. She begins by projecting or drawing architectural elements onto canvas — city plans, sections, elevations — often sourced from specific locations with histories she wants to hold in view. Over these she works in ink and acrylic, building up surfaces that simultaneously reveal and obscure the structural underlay. The marks range from controlled architectural drafting to sweeping gestures made with large brushes or spray.
The paintings are large because scale is part of the argument: a map of a district's redevelopment plan, rendered at building-plan size, starts to read as the subject rather than reference. Stadia II (2004), commissioned for Deutsche Bank, used the geometries of sports arenas — sites of crowd control, spectacle, and social compression — as the structural framework.
I am trying to make paintings that are complex enough to hold the weight of the world, but also open enough to allow for the space of the viewer.
Recognition and major commissions
Mehretu received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. Her 2009 mural Mural — commissioned for the lobby of Goldman Sachs's new headquarters at 200 West Street in New York — is among the largest paintings by a living artist in a permanent public installation: approximately 23 × 8 metres. The commission was controversial given its location but extended her practice into genuinely architectural space.
She has had retrospective exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2019–2021), which toured internationally. Her work is held in the permanent collections of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and Tate Modern.
