Julie Mehretu｜Julie Meletu

American / Ethiopian background

1. Artist Profile

Julie Meretou was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and has experience living in both Ethiopia and the United States. She is an artist active in contemporary art in the United States. She is known for her large-scale paintings, works on paper, and prints, weaving together architectural drawings, maps, and news images with hand-drawn traces to create dense images that touch upon the complex dynamics of cities, migration, and history in an abstract language.

2. Artistic Concepts

Meretut does not see painting as a direct reproduction of a place or event, but as a field where visual information is gathered, obscured, and reorganized. She mobilizes architectural, geographical, political images and resources from art history to bring perspective, order, and movement into conflict; the layered abstract space points to power structures, global flows, fragmented experiences, and collective histories.

3. Main Materials, Manufacturing Processes, and Technologies

She primarily paints on canvas using ink and acrylic paints; works on paper can be seen incorporating graphite, chalk, watercolor, and collage, as well as creating prints. The process usually involves drawing, overlaying, superposition, and partial sanding: architectural line drawings, color blocks, fluid brushstrokes, and imagistic contours are deposited, revealed, or erased between multiple layers of surface, creating a space that combines the qualities of painting and drawing.

4. Anatomy and analysis of the work

The in-depth study of the selected works is based on the images numbered 01–10. It is presented in detail for each piece, examining aspects such as the image and spatial structure, color relationships, material surfaces, production techniques, and visual language. Please click on the “Enter the Artist’s Deep Study” link below the page to view the works’ images and the full anatomical analysis.