Julie Mehretu
Architectural drawing, weather and history layered until the city underneath disappears.
Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and left Ethiopia with her family at seven for Michigan. She studied at Kalamazoo, in Senegal and at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has worked in New York since. The paintings are built in layers: architectural plans, maps, stadium diagrams and city grids drawn in ink and acrylic, then partly obscured by successive layers of marks, gestures and blurred photographic ground, so that a specific place and a specific event are present underneath but never legible. She painted a large mural for Goldman Sachs and a two-panel work for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The paintings are large, unique and scarce relative to demand; the layered acrylic-and-ink surfaces are matt and unvarnished and are effectively impossible to clean, so condition and framing history matter. Mehretu is also a serious printmaker, working in etching, aquatint, screenprint and photogravure with Gemini G.E.L., Highpoint and others in editions of twenty to sixty, and these are the accessible part of the market. Drawings on paper are numerous. Provenance to a documented gallery or institutional source is expected at the upper end.
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