Workday
Julie Mehretu
Filmed in her Berlin studio, Julie Mehretu discusses the ups and downs of her daily studio practice. “Some days, you’ll have a great day and leave in the best place because you had this intense engagement,” says the artist. “Other days, I just can’t seem to find that connection.”
Mehretu is shown working on the painting Middle Grey (2007–2009), one work in a suite of seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim as part of the exhibition Julie Mehretu: Grey Area.
Featured artists
About the artists
Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings’ wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.
