"What has fascinated me about her work...is the sensitive way in which she transcribes the chaos of a world in constant
upheaval, with intersecting architectural, political, social, and cultural influences. In a way,
her work reflects her own history, since she was born in Africa and moved to America,
before traveling across Europe."
Francois Pinault
President Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana
Palazzo Grassi
Julie Mehretu - Ensemble
Nairy Baghramian - Huma Bhabha - Tacita Dean - David Hammons
Robin Coste Lewis - Paul Pfeiffer - Jessica Rankin
At Palazzo Grassi - until January 6 - Ensemble - is the largest exhibition of Julie Mehretu's work to date in Europe. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, with Julie Mehretu, the exhibition brings together a large selection of her works, that she produced over the timespan of 25 years, including several of her recent paintings from 2021-2024. The exhibition is punctuated by the presence of the works by some of her closest artist friends - Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis,
Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin - with whom she has developed a powerful affinity over the years and with whom she has exchanged and collaborated,it is organised following a principle of visual echoes, and is conceived as a free, non-chronological journey through her work.
Julie Mehretu - Transpaintingspaintings - 2023
framed in a aluminium sculpture conceived by - Nairy Baghramian
"Several refer to contemporary
events, such as the war in Syria or the peril of migration. They remind us that the artist,
even when she uses metaphorical language specific to painting, is in no way cut off from
our world and the challenges it faces—which is unsurprising, given her personal history."
Bruno Racine
The palimpsest of Mehretu's work, forms multiple surfaces images and echoes with the collective dimension of working together with pieces by her friends - Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Robin Coste Lewis, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin - which enter into a rich dialogue with her own art. Beyond their formal differences, common concerns and shared driving forces become apparent, challenging the idea that the artist is self-sufficient and showing that, on the contrary, she is connected to others, to their thoughts and sensibilities. Their works inspire her and resonate with her own, with her way of looking at the world—all the more since each of these artists, like Julie Mehretu herself, experienced displacements that deeply shaped who they became, by force or by choice, leaving or fleeing Ethiopia, Iran, Pakistan. Their participation
in the exhibition is a testament to her acute attention to these gradually woven
relationships, to their seminal role and creative power.
Bruno Racine - Director - CEO - Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana
Caroline Bourgeois - Chief Curator - Pinault Collection
Julie Mehretu - Rise of the New Suprematists - 2001
"In these blurry images, I see apparitions, the ghosts of the moment represented in the photograph... I am fascinated by this evanescence, by the loss of focus, by how much of these images still transpires"
In 2018, a fire broke out at the National Museum in Rio. In a few hours the fire destroyed almost all of the institution's collections. The event was widely reported and images of the devastating fire circulated rapidly online. Mehretu immediately took possession of one of the photographs, in which the immense flames can be seen on the left, while a dense cloud of gray smoke emerges from each of the windows on the facade of the museum. Through a series of transformations, the artist maintains only the “DNA” of the original photograph, blurring it, converting into black and white, inverting its values and rotating it 270 degrees, thus transferring the image with the airbrush onto canvas, thus the painting takes on a confused appearance, made up of areas of light and shadow populated by amorphous and borderless masses...
Julie Mehretu - Maahes - Mihos - torch - 2018-19
"In this exhibition we have included the work of seven artists who have been important to me and are close friends of mine, save David Hammons, who I have known of for so long and has been somewhat of a guiding star."
Julie Mehretu
The artist draws on the realities of everyday life and the
territory of the street, as well as on scholarly references to the history of modern art—Dada,
Arte Povera, Marcel Duchamp—and to Black American culture, particularly jazz, and on a
range of African and diasporic cultural traditions. His incisive works, marked by a strong
symbolic charge that is as much poetic as it is political, point to the deleterious effects of
racism, oppression, and precariousness.
David Hammons - Untitled - 2010
Julie Mehretu - Iridium over Aleppo - 2012-2018
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, Julie Mehretu lives and works in
New York City. Her practice in painting, drawing and printmaking engage us in a
dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and
the psycho-geography of space by exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time
to a modern-day phenomenology of the social.
Julie Mehretu
"Some of my figures have the feeling that they might start walking. I give them the feeling of implied movement, even though they are completely stationary. The ideas is that they are on their way somewhere, who knows where."
Huma Bhabha
Huma Bhabha - New Human - 2023
Julie Mehretu - Invisible Line - Collective - 2010-2011
In her works - Black City - below - and - Invisible Line (collective) - above - Julie Mehretu explores complex urban landscapes through abstract elements like fortifications, stadiums, and logos. These pieces reflect her fascination with architecture, utopias, and globalization's spaces, viewing architectural forms not just as spatial metaphors but as expressions of power dynamics. Her art, reminiscent of Alexander Calder's mobiles and the Russian avant-garde, creates disorienting visual experiences that blend historical persistence with anticipated futures, presenting layered, uncertain space-time narratives.
Julie Mehretu - Invisible Line - Collective - detail - 2010-2011
Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan - Iran - and now lives and
works in Berlin, where she fled at the age of thirteen. She explores the practice
of sculpture to create works that question their setting and subvert expected modes of presentation, along with the architectural, sociological, political, and historical contexts that
underpin them. Using an abstract vocabulary that often combines geometric and organic
forms, and mixing industrial materials and processes with more supple and graceful elements,
Baghramian highlights the vulnerability of the human body transformed by history.
Nairy Baghramian - S'appuyant - 2022
Nairy Baghramian - Se Levant - mauve -2022
Starting in the mid-2010s, Julie Mehretu's canvases began featuring blurred colored shapes created from digitally altered news images, emblematic of significant events but rendered unrecognizable, transforming them into spaces for projection and reinvention. Mehretu's intuitive selection of these images reflects her engagement with global current events, particularly those highlighting human vulnerability and resistance, such as authoritarianism, civil unrest, and natural disasters, as well as movements like Black Lives Matter. She also honors African-American cultural figures, like jazz musicians and intellectuals, through her art. Some works reference historical paintings, linking past and present. Mehretu's evolving use of color, stenciling, screen printing, and diverse brushstrokes, alongside references to digital glitches and graffiti, results in dynamic, thought-provoking pieces that engage both sight and mind.
Julie Mehretu - Ghostymn - after the raft - 2019-21
Hammons's flag no longer floats in the wind but hang inert,
like the scorned banner of a nation in ruins."
Since the 1970s, David Hammons has embraced a fringe stance, creating transient, subversive art that influenced a generation of African-American artists. His work, characterized by diverse assemblages and sculptures, is rich in symbolic and poetic significance. In - Oh say can you see - above - Hammons reimagines the American flag with the Pan-African flag's colors, reflecting the civil rights movement's spirit. Lacerated, perforated and torn on all sides, Hammons's flag no longer floats in the wind but hangs inert, like the scorned banner of a nation in ruins.
David Hammons - Oh say can we see - 2017
Julie Mehretu - Black City - 2007
"Intimacy" reflects the long-standing friendship and intellectual dialogue between Lewis and Julie Mehretu, exploring themes of history, migration, desire, and the interplay between language and art.
Robin Coste Lewis - Intimacy - 2022
Paul Pfeiffer's Incarnator features hyper-realistic sculptures of pop icon Justin Bieber's body parts, such as the torso and limbs, evoking the image of a young saint or Christ figure in their dismembered and tattooed state. Drawing inspiration from the Spanish encarnadores tradition of creating lifelike Catholic icons, Pfeiffer's work connects the craftsmanship of religious devotion with modern celebrity worship. This tradition, which originated in 16th-century Seville and spread to the Philippines, involves a meticulous process of carving, drying, and painting to achieve a luminous effect in the sculptures, still revered in Philippine churches. Pfeiffer's sculptures and his broader artistic practice, including video montages of mass entertainment events, explore the parallels between religious fervor and the cult of celebrity, questioning the psychological impact and role of these forms of devotion in shaping contemporary consciousness.
Paul Pfeiffer - Incarnator - Seville - 2024
Justin Bieber Study for Ecce Homo
Drawing on a wide range of subjects, Jessica Rankin's art weaves together personal experiences, literature and poetry, the languages of abstraction, map making and landscape painting as well as observational mark making and drawing. Often through the use of tools traditionally associated with female activities—embroidery and needlework—her work presents itself in the form of “mental landscapes.” Rankin is convinced that "the act of sewing has a longevity, a resonance. It requires an ongoing relationship that reflects the random and repetitive movement of a word in your head, which lingers and returns."
Jessica Rankin - Forever on the Verge of Becoming - 2023
Paul Pfieffer - Incarnatar - Pampanga - Kurt - 2018
Since the mid 200s, Tacita Dean has created numerous portraits of other artists, always filmed in 16mm. By fixing the images of the people depicted, she portrays, she foregoes any traditional biographical narrative and instead links each artist, shown at work, in conversation or in the apparent banality of their daily lives, to the materiality or their production and the subtle mechanics of their thinking . Two films showing a more intimate side of Julie Mehretu, one at work, the other in casual conversation with an other artist, Venezuelan-American Luchita Hurtado, bear witness to the long intellectual companionship and unfailing friendship between Dean and Mehretu.
Tacita Dean - One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting - 2021
"In Desire was our breastplate, Julie Mehretu experiments with a new kind of acrylic paint: iridescent light emanates from the strokes that swirl across the surface. As you move across the canvas, you see them take on a pearly,
opalescent quality with a metallic finish."