Julie Mehretu

For over two decades, Julie Mehretu has composed works through a dense process of layering. Her painted and printed surfaces are typically covered in swarms of calligraphic lines, architectural grids, geometrical patterns, and expressive, meandering notations that cohere into fantastical topographies.

The museum recently acquired two monumental print series, Treatises on the Executed (from Robin’s Intimacy) and This Manifestation of Historical Restlessness (from Robin’s Intimacy) – each fourteen-feet-long and comprised of ten panels printed from the same fifty copper plates. The works are the result of an intensive and multi-year collaboration between Mehretu and Case Hudson, veteran printer at the LA-based printmaking workshop, Gemini G.E.L, along with a team of etchers. Initiated during Mehretu’s residency at the workshop in 2019, the prints are as complex and intricate in technique as they are in imagery: made through a combination of etching and aquatint and inked in the à la poupée manner, a technique that involves hand-applying ink to selective etched areas of a plate and then expertly wiping it away from other areas. Together, the works showcase the high velocity of Mehretu in action: her bold, calligraphic marks, her insistent lines and notations that never fully disclose their meanings.