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.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Major support is provided by

Sponsored by Max Mara and Phillips.

Esta exposición fue organizada por el Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Throughout Vera Lutter’s residency at LACMA, a team of filmmakers documented the building of her cameras on the museum’s outdoor plaza and inside the galleries, and followed the artist on a near-daily basis as she created the artworks on view here.  This short film shares behind-the-scenes footage as well as insights from Vera Lutter and exhibition curator Jennifer King into the artistic process and the meanings they find in her photographs.