DUSSELDORF.- The Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa) is one of the most influential painters working today. This first mid-career survey in Germany presents nearly 100 works expressing the full range of her artistic practice, from her early, urban-inspired line drawings of the 1990s to her most recent, spectacular abstract paintings. Also included are time-based media inspired by Mehretu’s work, such as a music album, as well as documentary and video works. The exhibition also explores Mehretu’s creative process. She often begins with media images of political events and historical sites, which she translates into abstract compositions layered with notations, overpaintings, and maskings. Through a selection of Mehretu’s source material and works on paper, some of which are being shown publicly for the first time, the K21 exhibition contextualizes the conceptual thinking behind the artist’s work.
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Mehretu was born in 1970 in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and fled with her family to Michigan, USA, in 1977 after the beginning of the military dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam. There she began her art studies at Kalamazoo College in the late 1980s, spent a year at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1997. Interrupted by working stays in Berlin and artist residencies in various parts of the United States, Mehretu has lived and worked in New York since the late 1990s.
Influenced by her experiences of flight and migration, Mehretu’s art has from the very beginning explored the upheavals and contradictions of history. In this context, she describes the large-scale works she has been making since the late 1990s as “story maps of no location.” Borrowing from the visual language of cartography, they are palimpsest-like, overall compositions composed of many layers of ink and acrylic paint. As is readily apparent in works such as Rise of the New Suprematists (2001) and Black City (2007), the lower layers consist of fragmentarily composed topographies and cityscapes. Without identifying a specific location, the structures are based on historical, contemporary, and utopian architecture. They refer to buildings as sites of historical action and, for Mehretu, symbolize the power of dominant politics. Above them, in swarm-like formations, are the fine dots and- lines of Mehretu’s drawing vocabulary. The arrangement of these so-called “characters” (beings, figures, signs) is analogous to the ever-changing economic, social, and political events of the world.
Accentuated by explosions, smoke, and vortex-like structures, they suggest dramatic upheavals. The result is highly complex, layered imagery that makes the processes of overwriting history between past and future legible and tangible.
Since the 2010s, Mehretu’s work has undergone a significant aesthetic transformation. Initially, the backgrounds turned gray, with increasingly expressive markings covering more and more of the surface. In works such as Conjured Parts (tongues) (2015), the line drawings in the background disappear in favor of spray painted forms of heavily manipulated, blurred photographs. These are appropriated from widespread media images associated with the rise of authoritarianism and white supremacy, the cruelty of civil wars and ethnic conflicts, catastrophic climate change, and emancipatory movements. They often show the vulnerability of people in the face of violence, but also their impressive capacity for resistance. If such images from Mehretu’s archive, which has been steadily growing since the 1990s, once influenced the dynamics of individual formations on the upper layers of her works, they now provide the guiding material for her completely abstract compositions that fill the canvas. As vividly illustrated in works such as Sun Ship (J.C.) (2018), Desire was our breastplate (2022–23), and TRANSpainting (recurrence) (2023), Mehretu continually incorporates new colors and various painting and printing techniques. The resulting images often resemble calligraphy, graffiti, and even cave paintings, and where language reaches its limits, she processes scenes from world events into “visual neologisms.”
In Düsseldorf, a selection of the source material that Mehretu has been collecting since the mid-1990s and that serves as the basis for her works is being shown for the first time in an exhibition. The “Archive Pages” (1997), also on view in the exhibition, make clear that this archive material functions as a guiding atlas for her painterly gestures and signs. This series consists of fifty-seven photocopied images, some of which Mehretu has annotated with her “characters”—a deliberately reduced sign language consisting, among other things, of crosses, dots, and dashes. As drawn precursors and miniatures, twenty early works on paper also illustrate how Mehretu’s large paintings developed layer by layer from the drawing. The comprehensive exhibition at K21 also includes a selection of Mehretu’s monotypes. The forty-six sheets illustrate how the versatile medium of printmaking is a constant field of experimentation for expanding her painterly repertoire.
Last year, after a long period of planning, two prestigious major projects were announced. Mehretu designed a more than twenty-five-meter-high window for the Obama Presidential Center. She created the twentieth BMW Art Car and, together with the BMW Group, will head the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC), a network for young filmmakers in five African countries, for the next two years. The maquette of the BMW Art Car can be seen in the exhibition, and a film program later in the year will show contributions by the artists involved in AFMAC. Her work has been exhibited at, among others, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hayward Gallery in London, the
Louisiana Museum in Humblebaek, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. She has also been represented at the Venice, São Paulo, Busan, Sydney, and Gwanju biennials, as well as dOCUMENTA (13), and has received major honors such as the MacArthur Award and the Medal of Arts Award.
The exhibition is curated by Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen, and Sebastian Peter, Assistant Curator.
Organized by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in collaboration with Pinault Collection, following the exhibition Julie Mehretu. Ensemble, presented at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 2024.
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