Julie Mehretu’s biography reads a bit like an atlas: born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, she now lives in New York. It is no surprise, then, that her work incorporates the dynamic visual vocabulary of maps, urban-planning grids, and architectural forms as it alternates between historical narratives and fictional landscapes. The exhibition Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting featured twelve newly commissioned, large-scale paintings and concludes a yearlong artist residency at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mehretu combines a personal language of signs and symbols with architectural imagery to create her elaborate semi-abstractions. Simultaneously engaged with the formal concerns of color and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism, and personal narrative, she is interested in "the multifaceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity." The underlying structure of Mehretu’s work consists of socially charged public places – government buildings, museums, stadiums, schools, and airports – drawn in the form of maps and diagrams. She inscribes her own narrative into these decontextualized, highly controlled spaces through the layering of personal markings. Achieving an effect of compositional maelstrom, Mehretu’s paintings blur the line between figuration and abstraction while constantly referencing the world around us – a perfect metaphor for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the twenty-first century.

Julie Mehretu: Drawing into Painting was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was made possible by generous support from the Voyageur Foundation Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation. Made possible, in Buffalo, through the generous support of Charles Balbach.