Julie Mehretu packs a great deal of information into her work: Chinese calligraphy, Japanese ink drawings, graffiti, video games, news imagery, weather systems, maps, blueprints, and city plans are all raw material for her paintings, drawings and prints. Yet despite her dense collections of systems and shapes, her works remain light and full of great, sweeping space. Mehretu is interested in (as she has written) “the role of an individual within a larger context.” Her exhibition at Crown Point Press titled “Heavy Weather”, showcased three etchings she completed just after Hurricane Katrina. Christopher Miles wrote in the September, 2004 Artforum that “Mehretu’s paintings play disturbingly against a backdrop of recent disasters such as 9/11 and the disintegration of the space shuttle. Hers is a world in which things fall apart, but also fall together.”
Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970. She attended the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar in Senegal before moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. A solo exhibition in 2003 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was titled “Drawing into Painting”, as her painting process is deeply rooted in drawing: she suggests movement, such as expanding spaces, through her dynamic use of line. For her prints at Crown Point Press, she used multiple plates to layer many different processes over one another.
Mehretu was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award. In 2005 she received a MacArthur Fellowship and the American Art Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her paintings are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2004 her work appeared at the Whitney Biennial and the São Paolo Biennial, and she has had solo shows at the Saint Louis Art Museum, The Project in New York, and Redcat in Los Angeles. She is represented by The Project in New York and Los Angeles, Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston, and Galerie Carlier in Berlin. She lives and works in New York.
- Rachel Lyon
