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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.

Mehretu often incorporates maps into her work in order to interrogate how political boundaries affect individual and collective identities. For the artist, whose personal history has been shaped by periods of migration—from Addis Ababa to East Lansing, New York, Berlin, and beyond—this practice has allowed her to “make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment.”

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.

Drawing is central to Mehretu’s practice, and the works on paper in this gallery serve in part as an index of the marks that appear in her paintings. They include prints in etching, aquatint, and engraving as well as more gestural and fluid compositions in watercolor and ink that anticipate the figurative elements in some of her more recent paintings. Many painters cover over their preliminary sketches, but Mehretu has always allowed her drawings to remain exposed.

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.

In her most recent paintings, Mehretu introduces bold gestural marks and employs a dynamic range of techniques such as airbrushing and screenprinting. The works draw on her archive of media images of major global events such as environmental catastrophes, wars, crises, protests, and abuses of power; she digitally blurs, crops, and rescales this source material, then uses it as the foundation for her paintings, overlaying the images with calligraphic sweeps and loose drawing.