Something New Something Else

Julie Mehretu’s is an art of accumulation. Since the early 1990s, the Ethiopian-born American artist has been exploring a visual language that is as informed by architecture, Renaissance art, Chinese ink painting, Japanese manga, cartography, jazz, Black abstraction and the civil rights movement as it is by global crises. Characterised by their calligraphic, often frenzied, mark-marking and luminous, shape-shifting surfaces, Mehretu’s paintings and prints have segued in scale from the intimate to the monumental.

Jennifer Higgie talked with Julie Mehretu about the National Gallery’s recent acquisition of her five-by-two-metre, six-panelled print, Epigraph, Damascus 2016.

Jennifer Higgie: Epigraph, Damascus is the first of your works to enter the national collection. What was its evolution?

Julie Mehretu: It was the first piece that I made with BORCH Editions. Niels Borch Jensen is an amazing master printer in Copenhagen who works with a team of master printers — they’re a very beautiful group of people. He’s also worked with [the artist] Tacita Dean and other friends, and he was keen on doing something together. We were talking for a couple of years before we actually did something. He was in my studio and saw this huge painting, Damascus, that I was working on that was in the architectural drawing stage. He suggested we could photograph it, make a plate and then I could draw and etch into it.

JH: What was the source material?

JM: It was a photograph of buildings that were destroyed in Damascus, which kind of reflect one another.

JH: And it was the first time you’d used this technique?

JM: Yes. I’d been working on these grey paintings, and that language is in there — the drawing is very gestural, rigorous and loose. We put large copper plates on the ground and I worked in reverse, with spit bite and sugar lift. The marks have some colour in them — some blue and black and green and black — that really flickers. So, it’s an intense print, but it was really exciting to work on — and it’s big!

JH: How much preparation do you do before making a work like this?

JM: The mark making doesn’t take much preparation, it happens while I’m doing it. The language is constantly evolving. The architectural and the blurred photographs both work as a kind of ‘social ground’, as my friend the artist Glenn Ligon calls it. And I feel that’s really true. It’s a way to find an entry point into the work.

JH: How long did Epigraph, Damascus take to make?

JM: It took a really long time to complete. The architectural drawing took nine months or more, then that was photographed in high resolution and then the projection drawings were printed on a photogravure plate. So, it has these different layers.

JH: Many of your paintings and prints are built up over architectural plans or photographs sourced from news outlets, which then become obscured, dissolved beneath translucent layers. How important is it for your audience to identify the original material?

JM: It’s not necessary to know the references to experience the work; you don’t even need to know the title, although perhaps it lends another layer. But, if you’re really curious, you could look up what the title might refer to, which can then uncover other stuff. It’s like experiencing a really great song: you can look at the liner notes if you want to, but to feel the song you don’t need to know everything. I hope that the paintings have something in them that activates a visceral and emotional response.

JH: Why do you often choose to start a work with distressing source material which is then obscured?

JM: I am interested in images, in their differences, and in what they can do. It’s a way for me to respond to some of the hauntingness I’m feeling — a kind of constant haunting presence that we’re all negotiating in terms of the new realities that we’re going into. This indeterminate space is blurred, reflecting the confusion of everything. It’s one of the reasons blurs are important for me right now in my work — they’re like points of entry. But I’m not thinking about the source photograph when I enter the work. I’m responding to what’s happening in the painted blur, and what point of entry I can pull out of that.

JH: Do all of your works have a point of entry that was a photographic source?

JM: Almost all, but not the ‘Black Paintings’. [Femenine in nine 2023–2024, is a cycle of nine paintings titled after a 1974 composition by Julius Eastman. Mehretu refers to the series as the ‘Black Paintings’.]

JH: How did the ‘Black Paintings’ evolve?

JM: I’d visited a small 16th-century church, Agia Dynamis, in central Athens that has religious paintings which, over the centuries, have turned black; almost every detail, except for the golden haloes of saintly figures, has been lost. They stuck with me. Another significant experience was a hike I took with my kids and [ex‑wife, the Australian artist] Jessica [Rankin] in Utah, where we came across what looked like white drawings or spray paint on rocks, but it’s just the natural geology. Both of these experiences were points of departure. Then, when I started working on the canvases, I accidentally used a weird silver interference spray paint that changed everything, because when I applied it, it wasn’t silver, it was violet. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s changed colour!’ So, I called it the magic ink. I thought it was just one bottle and maybe something had gone wrong with it.

JH: So, the iridescent marks on the surface of the paintings are the result of a beautiful accident?

JM: Yes! And then, I looked at the spray can with my glasses on — which I don’t usually wear in the studio because I think I don’t need them all the time, but I really do — and I realised it was an interference colour, called silver violet. After that, one of my assistants developed a range of interference colours for me to play with.

JH: It’s one of the mesmerising aspects of Femenine in nine that, as you move around the works, the colours shift in the light. Did you do a lot of preparatory drawings for this series?

JM: No, it was a very, very intuitive process. Towards the end, I was working on two or three canvases at a time; it was really liberating and within just a few months, I had finished them. Then, I started moving them around and a rhythm between them started to happen.

JH: Do you listen to music when you make your work?

JM: Yeah, I listen to everything — music, podcasts, news, books, history classes. I was listening to Julius Eastman’s Femenine, which is so great, as I was making the ‘Black Paintings’. There are so many moments in that piece that are intense and the title refers to the feminine: he was pushing that. But, despite the fact that he was this radical composer, he was kind of shunned by his contemporaries, such as John Cage. Eastman was also very open about being gay in a world that wasn’t very accepting. He lived radically.

JH: Abstraction is, of course, a complicated word — it means many different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

JM: When I was younger, I kept almost unknowingly pulling away from representation. It wasn’t until later that I started to really try and understand why. When I was in graduate school, it became really clear to me that part of the reason I resisted it was I didn’t want to have to define who I was or to represent myself. This was in the 1990s: I’d seen the 1993 Whitney Biennial and identity politics was really coming into the fore. I felt caught between different realities — being Ethiopian and living in the US. In interrogating that, I realised my perspective was one of being immersed in contradictions.

Later, I was thinking about [the late Martinican writer, poet, philosopher and literary critic] Edouard Glissant’s idea, from Caribbean Discourse (1981), of the right to opacity, the right to be able to invent and create. And I started really going into abstraction, inspired by amazing painters who were also civil-rights activists, like the late Jack Whitten and [his] relationship between jazz and the Black radical tradition. [The late American Jazz saxophonist and composer] John Coltrane would talk about universality, about music as a way of rigorously inventing something new from a knowledge of the past. It was an insistence on a kind of humanity, an insistence by these artists who knew their worth. Despite Jim Crow, despite every institutional effort to deny their humanity, these people had a deep knowledge of their value.

It’s so moving to think about that history. And it made me understand that one of my reasons for not wanting to describe something is not wanting to mimic anyone. Of course, I think there’s some incredible representational painting too, but I’m more interested in the space of what is possible. In that sense, working on the ‘Black Paintings’ was so liberating. There’s a joy in that, a kind of explosion of something new, of something else.

JH: You have a rich dialogue with the Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian, who designed Upright Brackets 2023–24, the free-standing aluminium supports for your series TRANSpaintings 2023–24. Will you keep collaborating with her?

JM: Sure, if she’d like to! We have an agreement that we’ve made 26 works together, and if that feels finished, it feels finished. But something happened when I was making the biggest painting of the series that I’d really like to push, so I might want to make some new ones.

JH: Which artists are you currently interested in?

JM: There are so many paintings that move me. I love looking at art in different places; it started when I first visited Rome as a young person. Caravaggio has been very influential. I titled my painting The Seven Acts of Mercy 2004 after his altarpiece of the same name [c 1607]; it’s such an exhilarating work. One of my favourite experiences of coming across something I didn’t know about was in Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo. It’s a 15th-century fresco called The Triumph of Death, by an unknown artist.

JH: What was it that grabbed you?

JM: It’s just beautiful and so moving. Also, it’s huge: there are so many parts to it. In the centre is a horse, painted as part skeleton, being ridden by a human skeleton, and they’re surrounded by people who are watching and praying, knowing that this will happen to all of us in the end. It was such a discovery — like a jolt. Another painting that had an impact on me is Titian’s Pieta c 1576 in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. It’s his last painting and it shows Christ’s chest seemingly falling apart, disintegrating into paint. It’s very moving.

JH: Could you sum up what it is that excites you about a work of art?

JM: I think it’s the desire to manifest the forces that we intuitively feel but don’t always understand, that insist on our fragility and humanity and the desire to express that. It’s the same with landscape painters who tried to describe the sublime, to inspire some kind of awe. I’m interested in why something moves me. That’s always been a question of mine. A lot of younger artists are like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to go to these colonial museums.’ But you’ve got to go look at this amazing stuff, no matter how complicated the history.

Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She lives and works in New York City. In 2024, the National Gallery acquired her six-panelled print, Epigraph, Damascus 2016. That year, she had two major exhibitions: Julie Mehretu: Ensemble at the Palazzo Grassi-Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy; and Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Gadigal/ Nura/Sydney.

This interview was commissioned as part of an editorial collaboration between the National Gallery and Ocula.

Epigraph, Damascus will be on display in Blueprints for temples from April 2 2026.

This story was first published in The Annual 2025.