In her work from the early 2000s, Mehretu reimagined the type of ordered space typically found in traditional European painting. She combined layers of buildings, explosions, and graphics from transit systems and airport terminals in Babel Unleashed, creating a micro-cosm of a metropolis, “full of migrants in transit, people walking by, through, past, and with each other.” For Mehretu, transit suggests the movement of both people and perspective: the staircase, for example, could represent ascent, but could also draw the viewer into the composition.

While living in Germany in 2008, Mehretu grew increasingly critical of American foreign policy, particularly the Iraq War and the War on Terror. In Berlin, she was surrounded by visible scars of the Holocaust and the Cold War, which pushed her to question her role as an American who opposed the war but nonetheless felt responsible for the terrors afflicted on Iraqi civilians and spaces. Seeking to develop a counternarrative, Mehretu began to incorporate techniques of erasure, opacity, and overwriting into her art practice. In Berliner Plätze, drawings of buildings mostly eradicated by bombings during World War II form a hazy gray field.

In 2013, deeply affected by the Syrian civil war, the spread of the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Mehretu began to move away from architectural drawing and instead use mark making and gesture to further explore violence, resistance, and struggle in her work. For the first time, she incorporated human-scaled figures into her compositions, began to work with new tools, and used her bare hands to push and pull paint. In both Being Higher I and II a body appears to be hovering among a variety of gestural marks that Mehretu made by swiping, patting, and even slapping the canvas.

In Invisible Line (collective), Mehretu presents a densely layered perspective of New York, combining historic, present-day, and unbuilt architectures and both pedestrian and aerial views of the city. By amalgamating these buildings and sightlines, she reduces the metropolis to a gray haze, drawing a connection between architecture and ruins and suggesting the blur of history and time and the buzz of the masses. Mehretu worked feverishly on this painting during the eighteen days of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which she followed on an Al Jazeera livestream in her studio. She was especially inspired by the massive public protest that brought down Hosni Mubarak, one of Africa’s longest serving dictators.

As its title suggests, Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson links disembodied anatomy with a site of violence and political strife. This painting began with a blurred photograph of an unarmed man with his hands up facing a group of police officers in riot gear, which was taken during the protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Mehretu layered color over a blurry, sanded black-and-grey background: fuchsia and peachy-pink areas rise from below, while toxic green tones float above, like distant skies drawing near. Outlines of eyes, buttocks, and other body parts appear within the graffiti-like marks and black blots that hover over smoky areas, suggesting human activity obscured. 

In many of her recent works, Mehretu has confronted extreme global events and their impact on our senses of time, space, and presence. She based Hineni (E. 3:4) on an image of the 2017 Northern California wildfires, while also exploring the burning of Rohingya homes in Myanmar as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The word “hineni” translates to “here I am” in Hebrew, which was Moses’s response to Yahweh (God), who called his name from within the burning bush to tell him he would lead the Israelites in the Exodus to the promised land. By interrogating three types of fires in this painting—one environmental, one intentional, one prophetic—Mehretu explores the contradictory meanings of a single elemental force.

For the diptych Haka (and Riot) Mehretu began with photographs taken inside detention facilities in Texas and California where undocumented migrant children have been detained. The artist blurred and abstracted these images with layer upon layer of digital and physical drawing, painting, airbrushing, and screenprinting, creating a distorted space filled with voids resembling sunken eyes, skulls, and orifices. These cavities seem to coalesce into a powerful, colossal form that suggests exorcism or a dancer performing the haka, a Māori war dance.

Mehretu has worked in printmaking since she was a graduate student. The methodical process of making prints, which includes decisions about line, weight, color, and layering, has informed her painting practice. “Lots of small marks have power,” she has explained, hinting at the social and political implications at the root of her approach to abstraction.

In Rembrandt’s iconic etching The Three Trees, numerous curlicues suggest foliage, while dense crosshatches evoke shade. In Haka, titled after a Māori war dance, Mehretu echoes Rembrandt’s monochromatic palette of stra nds, dots, and dashes, but uses them to evoke an action rather than to describe a landscape. The thin lines that resemble rain in the Rembrandt work take on a cosmic force in Haka, becoming interchangeably celebratory and catastrophic.

In GDGDA Tacita Dean captures Mehretu working in her studio, offering spectators a glimpse into a practice that is often shrouded and solitary. The camera looks over Mehretu’s shoulder as she works deliberately and intensely on Mural, a monumental corporate commission, in Lower Manhattan; “GDGDA” translates to “wall” or “mural” in Amharic, one of the Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

With this and similar works, Dean endeavors to create a new kind of biographical film, based on observation rather than narration. Simultaneously, she carries on the tradition of artists documenting one another in the midst of creation.

The 2011 Egyptian revolution—part of the “Arab Spring” of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa—was a major inspiration for this four-part painting and Cairo, installed in the outer gallery. Mogamma is named after an Egyptian government administrative building on Tahrir Square, which was seen as a symbol of modernism and the country’s liberation from colonial occupation when it was first built in 1949, but was later associated with government corruption and bureaucracy before eventually serving as the backdrop to a revolutionary site.

Mehretu began work on these four vertical canvases by exploring the densely layered environment of Tahrir Square, where a dizzying array of architectures—including structures built in Mamluk, Islamic, European, and Cold War styles—coexist. She created a web of drawings that conflate the Brutalist architectural style of the Mogamma with details from other public squares associated with the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring, such as the amphitheater stairs and spiraling lights of Meskel Square in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the mid-century high-rise buildings surrounding Zuccotti Park in New York. She also integrated drawings of globally iconic sites of public protest and change, such as Red Square in Moscow, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, and Firdos Square in Baghdad.

Epigraph, Damascus is a major achievement in printmaking for Mehretu, representing a new integration of architectural drawings and painting overlaid with an unprecedented array of marks. Working closely with master printer Niels Borch Jensen, Mehretu used photogravure, a nineteenth-century technique that fuses photography with etching. She built the foundation of the print on a blurred photograph layered with hand-drawn images of buildings in Damascus, Syria, then composited that together with a layer of gestural marks made on large sheets of Mylar. On a second plate, Mehretu executed her characteristic variety of light-handed brushstrokes, innovatively using techniques known as aquatint and open bite. Describing the interplay of architectural details and mark making in this work, Mehretu says, “You have the skeleton of the ghosts of Damascus, and then you have the blur, the haze, or breakdown of the ongoing civil war.”

This painting began with a map of Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, which Mehretu fused with maps of other African economic and political capitals, creating a vast network of aerial views of the continent. In subsequent layers she included drawings of both colonialist architecture in Africa and iconic modernist buildings erected there during and after liberation. In the center of the painting Mehretu layered drawings of the many African plazas of independence with idiosyncratic markings she has called “characters.” Here, these characters stage battles, migrate, form alliances, congregate, and ultimately participate in a system of entropy.

Mehretu has periodically painted large, horizontal canvases full of layered drawings—like the four in this gallery—to address complexities of scale, size, detail, and expanse. These panoramas often address monolithic histories, such as twentieth-century modernism and the African liberation movements of that time.

She painted Cairo after spending time in the city in the days following Egypt’s first democratic election. The painting explores Tahrir Square, which millions of protesters occupied for eighteen days in 2011, from multiple diffracted vantage points. Mehretu based the composition on an array of images such as aerial maps, her own photos, and a bus map that became the main artery inside the painting. The resulting work seems to vibrate and spin, suggesting the passage of time and the movements of millions of bodies during the uprisings.