Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa and lives and works in New York City. She earned her BA from Kalamazoo College in Michigan in 1992 and her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Her large-scale prints, paintings, and public works share a distinctive mark-making and layering technique, drawing inspiration from cityscapes and architecture as they speak to geographic and social histories and forms. This multivalent cosmopolitanism has recently turned to address questions of representation and politics, in paintings where photographic images and abstraction intersect. In fall 2019, a survey exhibition of her work will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“The structure, the architecture, the information and the visual signage that goes into my work changes in the context of what’s going on in the world and impacting me. Then there’s this other subconscious kind of drawing, . . ., and it’s the relationship between the two that really pushes me. . . . There are so many other ways to make paintings about these conditions that I’m drawn to. But there’s something that’s hard to speak about that abstraction gives me access to.”