Julie Mehretu

With Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer et Jessica Rankin

Palazzo Grassi is pleased to present a major exhibition dedicated to the work of American artist Julie Mehretu (b.1970, Addis Ababa). This significant exhibition will also interweave the presentation of works by artists who have been part of a circle of close friends or influential collocutors for Mehretu.

The exhibition brings together Mehretu’s work from a twenty-five-year period, featuring more than sixty works in painting and printmaking, including several of the artist’s recent paintings from 2021-2023. Presented over two floors of Palazzo Grassi, the exhibition includes works from the Pinault Collection, as well as loans from the artist’s collection, international museums and private collections.

Mehretu’s work will be presented alongside the artists and writers Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin, bringing the field of painting into dialogue with poetry, sculpture, film, voice, and music. Mehretu’s practice has always engaged in various forms of collaboration and sustained conversation with fellow artists. Foregrounding the relationship between intellectual and emotional affinities and artmaking, the exhibition draws a collective portrait of an artistic community in constant dialogue.

Julie Mehretu’s work is abstract. Her sensual and emotional compositions are imbued with palimpsestic and inventive marks that emerge to the surface from a density of multilayered and complex ideas that originate from her longstanding engagement with the traditions and traces of history and photography. Her references are far-reaching: equally art historical and socio-political, geographical, contemporaneous, and personal. Yet her insistence on the language of abstraction has afforded her the unique emancipatory space for experimentation and expression.

In cooperation with Palazzo Grassi, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf, will present the exhibition in 2025.

Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Chief Curator, Pinault Collection, with Julie Mehretu