Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an artist, best known for her densely-layered abstract paintings and prints. She lives and works in New York City. Mehretu shares her New York studio with her partner, the artist, Jessica Rankin.[1]
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Raised in East Lansing, Michigan, and a graduate of East Lansing High School, Mehretu received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and did a junior year abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, then attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997.[2][3]
Mehretu is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and by Jay Jopling from the White Cube art gallery in London[4] as well as by carlier gebauer in Berlin.[5]
| “ | I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilisations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place.[6] | ” |
Mehretu's painting Untitled 1 sold for $US1,022,500 at Sotheby's in September 2010.[7] It's estimated value had been $600–$800,000.[8]
In 2000, she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
Mehretu was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award.[9] Her work has been included in Greater New York, P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York (2000),[10] and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including one at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2000). More recently, her work has appeared in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); The Americans at the Barbican Gallery in London (2001); White Cube gallery in London (2002),[11] the Busan Biennale in Korea (2002); the 8th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania (2002); and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2001, she participated in the exhibition Painting at the Edge of the World at the Walker Art Center.[10]
Julie Mehretu was one of 38 artists whose work was exhibited in the 2004-5 Carnegie International: A Final Look.[12]
On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."[13] Mehretu was granted the award amid legal issues over her work and the right of first refusal contracts between her gallery and a collector.[14]
Mehretu's work was also included in the "In Praise of Doubt" exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in the summer of 2011.
Her works are held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.[15]
Although located in a private office building lobby, her 23' x 80' mural commissioned for the new Goldman Sachs tower in New York City (2010) is viewable from the sidewalk windows.[16]
