Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Julie Mehretu is a midcareer survey that will unite more than seventy paintings and works on paper dating from 1996 to the present, reflecting the breadth of Mehretu’s multilayered practice. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970 and based in New York City, Mehretu has created new forms and found unexpected resonances by drawing on the histories of art and human civilization. Her play with scale and technique, as evident in intimate drawings, large canvases, and complex forms of printmaking, will be explored in depth.
Filling the Whitney’s entire fifth floor gallery, the exhibition will take advantage of the expansive and open space to create dramatic vistas of Mehretu’s often panoramic paintings. The first-ever comprehensive survey of Mehretu’s career, Julie Mehretu is organized by Christine Y. Kim, curator of contemporary art at LACMA, with Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator at the Whitney. The installation at the Whitney is overseen by Hockley and on view from March 25 through August 8, 2021.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Kelvin and Hana Davis through the 2018 Collectors Committee M.2018.188a–f, Printed by BORCH Editions, Copenhagen © Julie Mehretu
“Few artistic encounters are more thrilling than standing close to one of Julie Mehretu’s monumental canvases,enveloped in its fullness, color, forms, and symbolic content. Mehretu’s conviction and mastery of composition andbrushwork—along with the sheer energy and full-on commitment of her execution—endow her works with a life force, presence, and presentness,” said Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney. “The Whitney Museum is particularly pleased to co-organize this mid-career survey with LACMA, and we are thrilled to continue our longstanding and close relationship with the artist, who has been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Whitney, beginning with the 2004 Biennial.”
Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, added: “Since 1948, when the Whitney presented its first retrospective of a living artist, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, we have maintained a strong commitment to providing substantial, in-depth views on the most groundbreaking artists of our time. I am thrilled that Mehretu’s show joins a sequence of midcareer surveys in our new building, which has featured Laura Owens, Zoe Leonard, and Rachel Harrison. Taken together, these shows reveal a wide variety of mediums and artistic approaches, but they are united in their emphasis on innovation and their shared concern for giving voice and shape to contemporary experience.”
Speaking emotionally, Mehretu described her most recent painting, still untitled, a site-specific piece based on two major worldwide events ~ that in Germany and the pro-Brexit rally ~ both, underlying images within the artwork. These are intense riotous images focusing on gatekeeping, with the painting placed in a windowed room overlooking the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty ~ our symbol of entry for new immigrants entering our country (image above and below).
Mehretu’s paintings synthesize vast amounts of visual information and diverse cultural references, from Babylonian stelae to architectural drawings and from European history painting to the sites and symbols of African liberation movements. Spanning medium, scale, and subject, the exhibition centers her examinations of colonialism, capitalism, global uprising, and displacement through the artistic strategies of abstraction, landscape, and, most recently, figuration. Often drawing upon the twenty-first-century city for inspiration, Mehretu condenses seemingly infinite urban narratives, architectural views, and street plans into single unified compositions. While she employs representational elements through imagery or titling, her work remains steadfastly abstract. This approach, where abstraction and representations commingle within a single canvas or series, allows a simple hand-drawn mark to take on figurative or narrative qualities.
“In their resistance to a single interpretation, Mehretu’s paintings encourage a nuanced reckoning with the true complexity of our politics, histories, and identities,” said Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator at the Whitney. “She often uses art as a means to frame social uprisings, including the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, as well as specific events like the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; wildfires in California; and the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar. Without being overtly literal, Mehretu’s work gives visual form to both the past and current moment. At its core, her art is invested in our lived experiences, examining how forces such as migration, capitalism, and climate change impact human populations ~ and possibilities. We look forward to bringing her brilliant explorations to Whitney audiences.”
59 ¾ × 71 ¾ inches (151.77 x 182.25 cm) Private collection, courtesy of White Cube
© Julie Mehretu
Along with a film on Mehretu by the artist Tacita Dean, the exhibition brings together nearly forty works on paper and thirty-five paintings dating from 1996 onward to reflect the breadth of Mehretu’s multilayered practice. The installation is loosely chronological, beginning with a gallery devoted to works from the mid-1990s, during which Mehretu developed her own idiosyncratic system of notation that includes “characters” such as dots, circles, crosses, arrows, barbells, and even organic forms like eyeballs, insects, wings, and beaks. She began to create drawings and paintings in which these characters gather to resemble migrating masses. In the gallery featuring her work from the early 2000s, Mehretu’s work embraces the monumental scale of history painting as she begins to work in painting cycles, creating loose, interrelated narratives across different bodies of work. The increasingly large and complex visual planes in her work of this period suggest a dense multicultural metropolis, “full of migrants in transit, people walking by, through, past, and with each other.”
Between 2010 and 2016, Mehretu’s visual language began to shift as the artist moved away from the detailedarchitecture and spectacular colored lines she employed previously. Instead, the works created during this period offer an intimacy and immediacy, with soft distorted blurs and smudges accompanied by gestural, emphatic marks and sometimes even the artist’s own palm prints. The exhibition culminates with a gallery showcasing the artist’s most recent works that explore current events and the unfolding histories that have long informed her practice. The base layers of these works are created by digitally blurring, rotating, and cropping photographs—of police in riot gear after the killing of Michael Brown, for instance, or fires raging simultaneously in California and Myanmar—and then marking over them. Mehretu is inspired by a variety of sources, from cave incisions, cartography, and Chinese calligraphy to architectural renderings, graffiti, and news photography. Drawing on this vast archive, she reformulates notions of how realities of the past and present shape human consciousness.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Julie Mehretu was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. Since 1999, she has lived and worked in New York, establishing herself as one of the most exciting artists working in the United States. She received a BA in art from Kalamazoo College, Michigan, studied at Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal, and received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Her select solo exhibitions include Julie Mehretu: A Universal History of Everything and Nothing, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2017); Julie Mehretu: Grey, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin (2010); Julie Mehretu: City Sightings, The Detroit Institute of Arts, MI (2007); Currents 95: Julie Mehretu, St. Louis Art Museum, MO (2005); Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2004); and Julie Mehretu, Artpace Foundation for Contemporary Art, San Antonio, TX (2001). Group exhibitions too numerous to mention.
About the Catalogue ~ Designed to allow close viewing of Mehretu’s vast canvases, the exhibition catalogue features lush reproductions of her paintings in their entirety, as well as numerous full-page details. Long overdue, this 320-page, hardcover volume pays tribute to an artist whose work and process intermingle in a unique and important examination of painting, history, geopolitics, and displacement. Edited by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley with contributions by Andrianna Campbell, Adrienne Edwards, Thelma Golden, Mathew Hale, Leslie Jones, Christine Y. Kim, Fred Moten, and Dagmawi Woubshet, Julie Mehretu includes 455 color illustrations and is published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and distributed by DelMonico Books and Prestel, Munich London New York.
Julie Mehretu at The Whitney will be on view from March 25 through August 8, 2021. The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street in the historic Meatpacking District, NYC.
We can’t conclude without mentioning one of our favorite large-scale murals, created by Mehretu in 2010, located in the lobby at Goldman Sachs. (video below).
In the video, viewers get a sense of the scale and intricacy of her work, which extends eighty-feet long by twenty-three-feet high. This lobby is not open to the public, however the large, open windows to the lobby from street level, show the artwork well.
Take a look inside the artists studio with Galerie Magazine.
While you’re there, Madeline Hollander: Flatwing is on view from March 25 to August 8, 2021. this is the first solo museum exhibition by the artist, dancer, and choreographer, and features a new video installation, Flatwing, with related works on paper.
On the vinyl billboard across Gansevoort Street, is artist Andrea Carlson and her installation entitled Red Exit. Here, the artist honors her Native-American background with a picture-story of re-creation and renewal. The images drawn from her ancestral home invoke moments of resistance and empowerment. Andrea Carlson: Red Exit will be on view to September, 2021.
While you’re there, step into Allouche Gallery, right next door – also on Gansevoort Street. Walk up onto The High Line, and have lunch at Hectors Diner, under The High Line on Little West 12th Street.
Thank you for the write up! I’m excited for the exhibition.
The catalogue you mentioned — is that the catalogue edited by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley from November 2019?
We were given no date on the catalogue. It was designed to allow close viewing of Mehretu’s vast canvases, the exhibition catalogue features lush reproductions of her paintings in their entirety, as well as numerous full-page details. Long overdue, this 320-page, hardcover volume pays tribute to an artist whose work and process intermingle in a unique and important examination of painting, history, geopolitics, and displacement. It was edited by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley with contributions by Andrianna Campbell, Adrienne Edwards, Thelma Golden, Mathew Hale, Leslie Jones, Christine Y. Kim, Fred Moten, and Dagmawi Woubshet, Julie Mehretu includes 455 color illustrations and is published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and distributed by DelMonico Books and Prestel, Munich London New York. It very well may be the same as the catalogue (2019) you’re referring to.