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.

Recently acquired by the Art Museum, this exhibition will position two fourteen-foot-long prints – Treatises on the Executed (2022) and This Manifestation of Historical Restlessness (2022) – each comprised of ten panels printed from the same fifty copper plates. The works are the result of an intensive and multiyear collaboration between Mehretu and veteran Gemini printer, Case Hudson, along with a team of five etchers. Initiated during Mehretu’s month-long residency at the workshop in 2019, the prints are as complex and intricate in technique as they are in imagery: both printed 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 graffiti, her insistent lines and notations that never fully disclose their meanings.