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Julie Mehretu Biography

Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an artist, best known for her densely layered abstract paintings and prints. She is best known for her large-scale paintings that take the abstract energy, topography, and sensibility of global urban landscapes as a source of inspiration.

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Julie Mehretu Quotes

When you're not a mom, you can get up in the middle of the night, paint, sleep all morning. . . you can't do that when you have two children!

Children, Mom, Morning, Paint

The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.

Political, Space, Time, Understanding

I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

Artist, Know, Know How, Life, Wanted

People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.

Painting, People, Thinking, Two, Work

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

Collective, Collectives, Experiences, Persons, Time, Who You Are

That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.

Imagining, Knowing, Moment, Not Knowing, Possible, Space

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

Read, Reason, Spell, Stories, Thinking, Trying

I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.

Event, Events, Illustration, Occurring, Same, Way

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

Abstraction, Element, Elements, Interested, Nondefinitive

The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.

Historical, Hopeful, Painting, Pessimistic, Political, Seemed

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

Come Up, Conversation, Detroit, Race

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.

Gets, Illumination, Think, Thinking, Trying