Through her exploration of abstraction, scale, and, most recently, figuration, Julie Mehretu’s monumental works and her idiosyncratic vocabulary of forms have brought to the fore themes of borders, survival, climate change, and capitalism. The dramatic vistas of her often panoramic canvases foreground the artist’s reckoning with complex histories of landscape, architecture, and past civilizations alongside themes of globalization and revolution in the contemporary moment.
This mid-career survey of Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) covers more than two decades of the artist’s examination of painting, history, geopolitics, and displacement. Including approximately thirty paintings and forty works on paper dating from 1996 to today, the exhibition presents the most comprehensive overview to date of Mehretu’s practice.
Julie Mehretu is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Christine Y. Kim, curator of contemporary art at LACMA, with Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator at the Whitney.