JULIE MEHRETU

Early life and Education

Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970 and emigrated with her family to the United States in 1977, settling in East Lansing, Michigan. She studied at Kalamazoo College (BA, 1992), spent time at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, and completed an MFA with honours at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Mehretu is based in New York and has maintained studios there and, at times, in Berlin.

Julie Mehretu’s Artistic Practice, Style, and Techniques

Julie Mehretu’s paintings, drawings, and prints build dense spatial fields by layering architectural plans, city maps, texts, diagrams, and digitised photographs with ink, acrylic, graphite, airbrushing, and erasure. She often begins with digitally manipulated imagery of stadiums, financial districts, sites of protest, and zones of conflict, which she then veils with translucent colour and energetic mark-making, producing compositions that hover between representation and abstraction. Her use of techniques such as overpainting, scraping, and blurring compresses multiple temporal and spatial registers into a single surface, turning each work into a kind of psychogeographic map of contemporary life.

Across media—including painting, drawing, etching, and aquatint—Mehretu explores themes of globalisation, displacement, urbanisation, climate crisis, and the infrastructures of state and financial power. Her large-scale canvases invite viewers to move physically in front of the work, emphasising the embodied experience of looking and situating the viewer within the flows of information and history that her images evoke.

Key periods and Seminal works

Early 2000s: ‘Stadia’ series and urban cartographies

In the early 2000s, Mehretu developed the signature visual language that brought her international recognition, combining architectural schematics with calligraphic marks and graphic symbols. Seminal works from this period include Empirical Construction, Istanbul (2003) and the Stadia paintings, particularly Stadia II (2004), which draw from plans of sports arenas and global sites of spectacle to explore nationalism, empire, and mass gathering. These layered compositions position Mehretu at the forefront of a new cartographic abstraction, mapping the dynamics of contemporary geopolitics onto imaginary urban spaces.

In 2009 she completed the monumental painting Mural for the lobby of the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York, a 90-foot work that visualises flows of capital, migration, and urban density through swirling, architectonic forms. This commission solidified her status as a major voice in public and corporate art.

Late 2000s–early 2010s: city sitings and institutional shows

Major solo exhibitions during this period trace the evolution of Mehretu’s engagement with architecture and history. Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting at the Walker Art Center (2003), Julie Mehretu at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (2006), and Julie Mehretu: City Sitings at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2007) surveyed her early experiments with urban cartographies and complex spatial layering.

Julie Mehretu: Grey Area at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009), presented a cycle of paintings that reflected on Berlin’s architecture and history, suggesting cycles of destruction and reconstruction. This body of work deepened her investigation into how cities embody political and historical change.

2010s: ‘Mogamma’ and political abstraction

In the 2010s, Mehretu’s practice became more explicitly engaged with protest, conflict, and migration, responding to events such as the 2008 financial crisis and the Arab Spring. The four-panel work Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (2012) takes its structure from Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the surrounding Mogamma building, layering agitated marks over architectural outlines to evoke crowds, movement, and upheaval.

During this time, she began to incorporate blurred photographic imagery—riot scenes, burning buildings, and other media images—into the underlayers of her canvases, then obscuring and transforming them through airbrushing, scraping, and overpainting. This method, which continues in later work, creates a tension between documentation and abstraction, reflecting on how images of crisis circulate and become part of collective memory.

Late 2010s–2020s: ‘Hineni’ and atmospheric fields

By the late 2010s, Mehretu’s paintings moved toward more atmospheric, gestural fields, in which architectural frameworks dissolve into storms of colour and line. A key work from this period is Hineni (E. 3:4) (2018), included in her mid-career retrospective organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019–2021). In Hineni, layers of blurred photographic imagery and airbrushed colour underlie frenetic marks, producing a charged, almost cosmic space that speaks to spiritual, emotional, and political registers at once. The retrospective surveyed more than two decades of her practice, underscoring her contribution to contemporary abstraction and her sustained engagement with histories of displacement and protest.

Most recently, Mehretu’s solo exhibition Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology) at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (14 April–6 June 2026), brings together new and distinct bodies of work from 2024–2026. The show extends her exploration of atmospheric abstraction and hauntology, foregrounding how her painting registers layered temporalities and the spectral traces of contemporary political events. The exhibition includes a series of live performances under the direction of choreographer John Jasperse Projects, who was invited to create a new dance work titled Wandering in response to Mehretu’s paintings. Wandering is performed twice daily over four consecutive days, from 20–23 May 2026, underscoring Mehretu’s growing interest in dance and embodied responses to her work.

Mid-2020s: ‘TRANSpaintings’ and ‘Femenine in nine’

In the mid-2020s, Mehretu’s work took new spatial and structural directions with the development of the TRANSpaintings and the suite Femenine in nine. The TRANSpaintings (2023–2024) were a centrepiece of Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, presented as part of the Sydney International Art Series from 29 November 2024 to 27 April 2025. These suspended canvases invited viewers to move around and through the painted environment, extending Mehretu’s interest in how painting can choreograph bodily movement and social interaction, while exploring darkness, instability, and the architecture of the contemporary city.

Femenine in nine (2023–2024), inspired by Julius Eastman‘s 1974 composition Femenine, translates repetitive, improvisatory musical structures into a serial visual language. Part of this suite has been acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, reinforcing Mehretu’s growing presence in Asia–Pacific collections. In Conversation with Jennifer Higgie about the MCA show, published on Ocula and in the National Gallery of Australia’s yearly print edition The Annual, Mehretu discusses the radical uses of abstraction, the importance of music, and her engagement with art history. She reflects on how abstraction can process and represent complex histories and emotions and describes music as particularly influential on the rhythm and structure of her compositions. Mehretu also draws inspiration from historical artworks, using them to explore contemporary themes and narratives.

“I am interested in images, their differences, and what they can do. It’s a way for me to respond to some of the hauntingness I’m feeling—a kind of constant haunting presence that we’re all negotiating in terms of the new realities that we’re going into. This indeterminate, haunted space is blurred, reflecting the confusion of everything.”

Major Commissions and Public Art: ‘Uprising of the Sun’

In addition to important commissions such as Mural for Goldman Sachs, Mehretu has undertaken major institutional and public projects. In 2024 the Obama Foundation announced Uprising of the Sun, an 83-foot-tall painted glass window on the north façade of the Obama Presidential Center Museum building in Chicago, composed of 35 painted glass panels. Inspired by President Barack Obama’s remarks at the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, the work reflects on the historical context of his legacy and will greet visitors when the Center opens. Uprising of the Sun stands as a landmark of contemporary public art and a major statement within Mehretu’s career.

Venice Biennale and Key Exhibitions

Julie Mehretu has participated in major international exhibitions that have shaped the discourse on contemporary painting. For the 58th Venice Biennale central exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times (2019), she presented paintings derived from images of sites including a migrant detention centre in Texas, the burned Grenfell Tower in London, and rallies for Brazilian politician Jair Bolsonaro, which she layered, blurred, and partially erased to create turbulent, disorienting compositions. These works underscored her ongoing exploration of visibility, erasure, and the politics of representation.

Other key group exhibitions include Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007), Documenta 13 in Kassel (2012), and The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014), where she was presented alongside leading contemporary painters. More recent group shows such as A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920–2020 (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2022) and Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970 (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2023) have positioned Mehretu within broader histories of studio practice and global abstraction.

Major solo exhibitions

Selected solo exhibitions by Julie Mehretu include:

• Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003).
• Julie Mehretu, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2006).
• Julie Mehretu: City Sitings, Detroit Institute of Arts (2007).
• Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009).
• Julie Mehretu: Liminal Squared, Tate Modern, London (2013).
• Julie Mehretu, Whitney Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019–2021).
• Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (Sydney International Art Series, 2024–2025).
• Ensemble, Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection, Venice (2024).
• Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology), Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (14 April–6 June 2026).

These exhibitions chart the development of Mehretu’s practice from early architectural abstractions to immersive, multi-canvas installations.

Awards, Collections, and Critical Reception

Julie Mehretu has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship (2005), the US Department of State Medal of Arts (2015), and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University (2021). She has also been recognised with the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Penny McCall Award, and support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. In 2025 she was named an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Her works are held in major collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate; the Guggenheim Museum; and The Broad, among others. Mehretu’s practice has been extensively discussed in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Frieze, and Ocula, where critics highlight her formal innovation and the way her abstraction addresses histories of displacement, conflict, and contemporary global systems.

Julie Mehretu FAQs

Ocula | 2026