Julie Mehretu: A Mid-Career Retrospective at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA

by Arden Cone

If the museum is to the artist, what the stadium is to the athlete, Julie Mehretu’s mid-career retrospective, closing today at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), has granted museum-goers in the South a ticket to the big leagues. In the same way that a sports legend might arrive unceremoniously to humble the would-be intimidator, Mehretu came to the High with calculated, crushing havoc to bear.

Image by Mike Jenson

Curators Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley chronologically arranged 25 years of the artist’s work through the large galleries, turning each room into a stadium of monoliths. Mehretu’s works reach a hundred and twenty inches in height and over two hundred inches in width; face-to-face, even one’s periphery cannot size them up.

The first gallery, which contained smaller works from the late 90s and early 2000s, was set to ease the viewer into the glaring field.  It’s almost too easy to be human here—to be greedy, that is. I found myself rash and impatient to take on the colossal works in the galleries beyond.

Julie Mehretu, Untitled 2, 2001, ink and acrylic on canvas, 60 . 84 inches, private collection. © Julie Mehretu, photograph by Tom Powel Imaging. 

Mehretu’s works from the early 2000s, most of which are ink and acrylic on canvas, simultaneously reveal and reject the internal structures that build them. Beneath the exploded pictorial space in Untitled 2, fragments of city life—maps of transit systems, airports, and architectural drawings—add multiple perspectives to a single painting. They are chaos; so was Julie Mehretu’s New York home base that year: the September 11th terrorist attacks left an indelible mark on her exploration of human structures and their descent into entropy.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts), 2012, installation view in Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012. © Julie Mehretu, photograph by Ryszard Kasiewicz, courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and White Cube. 

Stadia II, a large work in the following room, recognizes the power dynamics that run through our highly connected world. It conjures the stadium itself. Curved, sweeping lines form the bowl of a coliseum, while buoyant and colorful flags adorn the space above the implied horizon.

Though energetic, and exciting, Stadia II, calls upon darker issues. The pleasing visualization welcomes the eye of the viewer, only to unravel itself in their psyche. It lays bare the power structures inherent within sporting events such as the Olympic Games or the Super Bowl. With just a tweak or one’s thoughts, team fandom and regalia easily resemble tribalism. Flags of countries come to signify imperialism, with all the violence and oppression that the word implies. Even what people take for leisure is fraught with an undercurrent of disruption.

Julie Mehretu, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts), 2012, installation view in Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012. © Julie Mehretu, photograph by Ryszard Kasiewicz, courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and White Cube. 

Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born immigrant to the United States, takes the pulse of global environments by charting geopolitical events in the United States, North Africa, and the Middle East. The Arab Spring Uprisings, which led to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, inspired multiple works in the exhibition, including Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts). The four equally sized, vertically oriented paintings are part of what the artist refers to as a “cycle” of works.

Through the means of drawing, Mehretu investigates the architecture of Tahrir Square, a public space that served as the backdrop of the Arab Spring Uprisings. Just as public squares encourage togetherness, they encourage revolt, upsetting the dynamics of who is the overcome, the overrun, the overpowered, and the overthrown.

Mehretu uses repeated marks, what she calls “characters,” to represent the movement of populations. One can see their formations change. A certain pattern may represent militaristic movement; others may indicate a migration or the diaspora of a people.

More so than previous works, Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) displays the touch of Mehretu’s hand. Each canvas is remarkably built up, mainly black and white with only bits of coloring in the form of lines, curves, and blocks. The characters in the painting follow a leader—or something of a hive mind—to migrate, congregate, swarm, and march off in synchronicity to somewhere unknown.

Julie Mehretu, Epigraph, Damascus, 2016, photogravure, sugar lift, aquatint, spit bite aquatint, open bite, 8.1 . 18.8 feet, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Kelvin and Hana Davis through the 2018 Collectors Committee. © Julie Mehretu, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. 

In a tucked-away gallery, but not easy to miss, is a room of the artist’s prints. What stands alone is an 8.1 by 18 foot work on paper: a photogravure, sugar lift, spit bite, aquatint, open bite, grouping of six titled Epigraph Damascus. Logistically speaking, it was an unlikely feat to print at this scale, which speaks to the mastery that Mehretu and her assistants have over a variety of media.

 The final room of the retrospective holds the artist’s most recent works, where her tone and mark-making take on a new sense of urgency. The airbrushed base colors—bold, dark, colorful, saturated, and unstable—originate from highly blurred media photos as source materials. They capture moments of national or global crisis, including environmental disasters, protests, wars, and shootings.

Julie Mehretu, Hineni (E. 3:4), 2018, ink and acrylic on canvas, 96 . 120 inches, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle; gift of George Economou, 2019. © Julie Mehretu, photograph by Tom Powel Imaging. 

Hineni (E.3:4), a ninety-six by one hundred and twenty inch painting, screams out for help. Hints of red and green overlay its largely orange base. On top, black ink marks—a product of a loose, direct hand—resemble not the ordered characters that marched across her earlier paintings. Lacking perspectival clues, a careful study of it leads only to disorientation, a collapse of space. There is no notion of which way is up, down, or out of the fire.
Though the work is abstract, its reference photographs of Northern California wildfires are not hard to imagine. Without the help of the wall text, however, the viewer is unlikely to follow its meaning from there. Beneath face value, it references the Rohingya burnings, associated with an ethnic cleansing campaign in Myanmar.  

I would hazard to say that even a savvy viewer might feel like a layperson when faced with Mehretu’s ambitious paintings. Human-created structures, in the visual and conceptual realm, implode and explode simultaneously. In the space of a painting, she conjures the forces that populations as a whole exert, attempting to control but instead expediting the inevitable, universal force called entropy.