Julie Mehretu

Biography

In 2007 an investment bank commissioned Julie Mehretu to paint a mural for the lobby of its skyscraper at 200 West Street in New York. The result was a painting the size of a tennis court, roughly twenty-four metres by seven: overlapping financial maps, architectural drawings of banks and exchanges, references to the work of other artists. Calvin Tomkins, the critic of The New Yorker, called it the most ambitious painting he had seen in a dozen years.

The artist was thirty-six at the time.

She was born on 28 November 1970 in Addis Ababa, and in 1977 the family moved to East Lansing, Michigan. After school Mehretu graduated from Kalamazoo College, spending her third year in Dakar, at Cheikh Anta Diop University. In 1997 she took a master's degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied in the painting and printmaking department, and went straight into the residency programme at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: a studio, a stipend and an exhibition at the museum. She has made prints steadily ever since, beginning with etching, at workshops in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Her canvases are built up in layers. Lines of marker, pencil and ink are laid over an acrylic ground, and through them show fragments of technical drawings, columns, facades, porticoes, city grids, weather charts. There is no single depth; the viewpoint shifts within one canvas, and the city comes out flattened, seen from everywhere at once. One painting of 2001 measures 2.59 by 5.49 metres. Critics bring up the Italian Futurists, geometric abstraction and the Abstract Expressionists in connection with her. Mehretu herself explained in 2002 that her abstract marks are for her something like characters with personalities of their own: on her maps they travel, build cities and make war, while she charts their suburbs and conflicts. Then these marks needed something to stand on, and architectural plans entered the paintings. Her drawings are made the same way as the paintings, only smaller; they are explorations between the big canvases.

In 2004 came “Emperial Construction, Istanbul”, with Arabic letters and letter-like forms scattered across the canvas, and the three “Stadia”, with outlines of stadiums, abstracted flags of the world and hints of corporate logos. In the same years she was shown at the Istanbul Biennial (2003), the Whitney Biennial and the São Paulo Biennial (2004), the Carnegie International (2004–2005) and the Biennale of Sydney (2006). In 2001 she was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2003 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she worked with thirty high-school girls from East Africa. In 2005 Mehretu received a MacArthur Fellowship.

In the spring of 2007 she lived in Berlin as a fellow of the American Academy, working in a former arms factory. The Deutsche Guggenheim commissioned seven paintings from her, and they became the series “Grey Area” (2008–2009), about Berlin as a place where the city was built and destroyed. Here the layers are laid down and then taken away again: some of the marks are sanded off the linen, and in “Berliner Plätze” the translucent outlines of nineteenth-century buildings show through the paint. I think that from this series on her paintings are easiest to read as maps that have been corrected and scraped clean many times over.

After that, other cities and events became her material. “Mogamma” (2012), four monumental canvases shown at Documenta in Kassel, is named after the government building on Tahrir Square in Cairo; in Arabic the word means “collective”. In “The Round City” (2013) Baghdad shows through. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art she painted a diptych flanking the staircase in the atrium, unveiled in September 2017; it is built on digitally processed photographs of street protests and images of the nineteenth-century American West. She painted it in a former church in Harlem, working throughout with the jazz pianist Jason Moran; in 2017 they presented a joint performance.

In 2013 she received the Barnett and Annalee Newman Award, in 2015 the US Department of State Medal of Arts, and in 2020 Time magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people. In 2021 the Whitney Museum of American Art gave a whole floor to her retrospective; she sits on its board of trustees. Her work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the museum in San Francisco, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin. In 2024 her first window in painted glass, “Uprising of the Sun”, twenty-six metres high and inspired by Obama's speech commemorating the Selma marches, was installed in the museum tower of the Barack Obama Presidential Center.

That same year Mehretu painted the twentieth BMW Art Car. At the 24 Hours of Le Mans the car, number 20, crashed early in the race, was repaired overnight and made it to the finish.