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.

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 Stadia II (left) and Black City (right), Mehretu interrogates sports and military typologies to disrupt modern conceptions of leisure, labor, and order. The coliseum, amphitheater, and stadium in Stadia II represent spaces that are designed to situate and organize large numbers of people but also contain an undercurrent of chaos and violence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These three works comprise Mehretu’s first painting cycle. She made Retopistics (center)—her first large-scale, wide-angled perspective on a dynamic, invented space—by layering various architectural histories, maps, and diagrams of airports and transit.

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.