Julie Mehretu valuation
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.
What a work by Julie Mehretu is worth
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Bio
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.
The surveys, and Highpoint
Her mid-career survey, organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, opened in Los Angeles in November 2019 and travelled to New York in 2021, with about thirty paintings and thirty works on paper from 1996 onwards. Ensemble, at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice from March 2024 to January 2025, was her largest exhibition in Europe to that date.
Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis began publishing with a Mehretu print, a 32-colour lithograph and screenprint co-published with the Walker Art Center, and has continued to work with her. Her prints are well documented by their publishers, and an impression should match the publisher's details of size, technique and edition.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
