Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian American contemporary artist celebrated for her large-scale abstract paintings that layer mapping, architecture, and digitised imagery to address globalisation, migration, and power. Her work is widely exhibited and collected internationally, and she is recognised as a leading figure in twenty-first-century painting. 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.