Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian-American artist born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and based in New York. She is known for large-scale paintings, drawings and prints built through intricate layers of images and marks. Her compositions combine architectural plans, maps, blurred photographs, calligraphic gestures and explosive fields of colour.

Mehretu’s abstractions do not illustrate a single place or event. They absorb traces of migration, war, political protest, capitalism, urban expansion and climate change. Different perspectives overlap until familiar structures become unstable. The resulting images evoke cities and landscapes transformed by movement, conflict and collective history.

Moving between drawing and painting, Mehretu questions how space is organised and how images shape political experience. Her works turn contemporary turbulence into a visual language without reducing it to a fixed message. This tag brings together articles, exhibitions and critical perspectives on Julie Mehretu’s artistic practice.