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.

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.

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.

In her Invisible Sun paintings, Mehretu moves away from the focus on the city and architecture that characterized her earlier work and instead concentrates on the creative mark and invention itself. Staccato markings and paint smudges resemble graffiti, calligraphy, and even musical notation. Mehretu’s liberated, loose, monochromatic strokes flow over the edges of their canvases, recalling prehistoric cave paintings and suggesting a wide range of possible forms.

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.