Julie Mehretu, American (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works in New York City. She received a B.A. from Kalamazoo College, Michigan, studied at the University Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar Senegal, and received a Master of Fine Arts with honors from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. She has received many prestigious awards including the MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts Award in 2015, membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2021, and the Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2025. Her work has been exhibited extensively in museums and biennials including the Carnegie International (2004–05), Sydney Biennial (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010), dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), Sharjah Biennial (2015), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2017), Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, UK (2019); and the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, (2019).
DC: I’d love to begin with your brand new solo exhibition, Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology) at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City, and it’s a new body of work made between 2024 and now. How did this show come together? When did you realize you had a new body of work?
JM: Well I think actually it’s like a chicken and an egg situation, because actually having a date for a show encourages bodies of work to be developed. I say that because it’s not always the work that comes—the work always comes first—but the deadlines are helpful in helping determine that.
I’ve been working on these different paintings, and I’m working on many different cycles of paintings. I did an exhibition in 2024 at White Cube in London, and it had a cycle of Black Paintings, my first cycle of TRANSpaintings, and this cycle of blurred TRADpaintings before that. This exhibition really continues with a lot of the investigations I was doing for that and pushes them even further. A lot of the material that I was working with before I was able to push that and bring new materials and new pigments into the paintings. I was able to find many more interference colors, I was able to really develop the TRANSpaintings from the back and the front in new ways. In many ways they’re new bodies of work but they’re part of a continuum. These bodies of work evolve, and the deadlines work as like markers to look in at where the work is at this point.
And of course I’m thinking very clearly about how they will be shown and exhibited and do you include all of them, do you include some of them, which are the successful ones? I think that’s always part of the process of developing a show, and paintings in exhibitions are about their relationally as much as they’re about the individual works. I think in this exhibition I was thinking a lot about these three phases, these three floors, and these very different kinds of spaces for these different groups of paintings.
DC: Could you talk a little bit about what connections you see between these three groups, and also how they relate to the title of the exhibition? I’m specifically curious about your use of that term hauntology which has been reappearing in your work lately.
JM: I think the way I think about the three floors that feels the most natural is that you walk into the gallery, and it’s the largest gallery in the building, and the Marian Goodman Gallery is a vertical gallery unlike most galleries, and the first floor has the high ceilings, it’s the largest, grandest space of the spaces here, and that has the largest painting in it. It’s at a scale much bigger than the other paintings in the show, and it feels much more cosmological in the way that it’s materialized and the way it’s developed, and it’s kind of the context in a way, it’s like the bigger picture. Then you have these larger TRANSpaintings as these two anchors on either side of that main gallery. So you have these three pieces in the first gallery. And then the second gallery that’s adjacent to that has just one painting, and that kind of sets the stage for the next two floors.
The second floor has more of a concentration of the smaller TRANSpaintings, it’s more intimate, it doesn’t have as tall of a ceiling height. And there’s one large painting as you turn the corner, you get this vista into this larger landscape format abstract painting. It relates pretty well with the transparent paintings on that level. Those transparent paintings are made in collaboration with Nairy Baghramian, she’s made these sculptural parts for the paintings called Upright Brackets, so they’re actually co-authored by both of us and they’re sculpture as well as painting as well as animatronics. They are completely interdependent.
And they change a lot. This is the really important thing, all of these paintings are very mutable, and very unstable in terms of what they seem to be as an image. They change constantly with your perspective and how the light is hitting the painting, and depending upon if there’s other people behind the painting or in front of the painting and what colors they’re wearing. They are constantly mutating and shifting and part of that shapeshifting is what I was really interested in and relates to the title.
The third floor are Black Paintings which have all kinds of interference pigment and paint, and black paint, as well as silver and white paint that goes into them. So you have this reflective material as well as material which absorbs light. They are going in and out of focus, these ghosts seem to appear and disappear. Marks come and go. A color you think you saw two minutes ago, you don’t see if you change where you’re standing. So they’re not fixed, they are constantly evolving and changing. And they play with our perception quite a bit. I think all of that kind of contributes to the lack of stability and flux, the complications of such violence at the same time as such emergence.
I think with the title I was thinking a lot about the transience of a shadow and the kind of fugitivity of our days and our realities and our understandings and efforts to make sense of things, and the fugitively of what is true and what is not true. We live in this time that really feels terrifying because of the palpable histories that we feel that are being brought up with what’s happening in the world today. But at the same time we also know that this is a very different world, and so it’s the kind of understanding that whatever is happening today is going to be history tomorrow. That sense of that passing and that fleetingness, the desire of making sense of this moment, but the non-abidance reality that we are immersed in.
DC: On one hand your paintings can feel like archaeology where you can dig into these layers of strata upon strata, but also in how slippery and evasive they are they can feel like outer space or something, in terms of like being constantly in motion.
JM: Yeah or like our bodies.
DC: Right like always in a state of becoming, not a state of being.
JM: Yes, exactly. The paintings are always in that state, because they’re not stable. You move to the right two inches and the painting looks different. They’re very holographic and dimensional in that way. They come in and out of focus. They’re fugitive in that way.
DC: Are there reference points that you’re thinking about with these paintings? They’re abstract works but in hearing you speak about them there are all of these different reference points in terms of metaphor for thinking through them. Are there any visual references that you’re pulling from as well? As you go about life are you collecting visuals constantly?
JM: Yeah for sure, there are the references of the past thirty years of being really engaged in mark-making in the way that I have been. There’s the history of looking at painting and understanding painting and visual language, but yeah there’s always things that I see that I’m like capturing or reconjuring. I think that inside the paintings you will see aspects of many of those histories of mark-making from the handprint to the silhouette of the hand all the way to a scratched mark that looks like it’s made with a stick instead of a brush. If a mark is made with spray or a mark is made with a printed material, they affect how you visually see the mark and how the material works.
I think this binary of abstraction and representation is a false binary in so many ways. I think we tend to always look for references in abstraction, and I think we tend to work with representational work with a lot of gestures of abstraction. So yeah I think there are body parts, there are moments that feel like bodies in motion, ghosts, the traces of a body, or the traces of a hand, a place that’s falling apart, a body that’s falling apart.
DC: If you could take us back to your time in Michigan, when you were working on your BA at Kalamazoo did your paintings look similar to how they do now? Were you working in abstraction? What would be something you think was present in your work then that feels like its continued on through your current work?
JM: I was working much more representationally. I was making portraits of my friends and partners at the time, or relatives. I was working with women, I was making these portraits of Black women in my life. I was really kind of taken with how I could break down the face and work with bold color and abstraction a little bit. But it was student work. I think the one thing that was there that is still there is this effort to make sense of the world and trying to figure out where I am and we are in that. Trying to find where our potency and our limits are, what liberates us and what enslaves us in what we engage. I think that is still what I am interested in.
DC: Do you see your work as having social and political responsibilities to it? Do you see it as having social or political opportunity? If so what do you see as the biggest opportunities or responsibilities within your work?
JM: I think art in general, because its a social medium, its something that doesn’t exist by itself in a vacuum. It can exist without people seeing it but then does it really exist? I think as fundamentally as what it is, it’s a social medium. It’s to be engaged with, and in that sense I think it participates in the construct of it.
Now I don’t like to put the social and political responsibility onto creative people, because one is a creative person. I really think about the creative process and the space of the imagination as a space of freedom and a space of liberation, and if that’s the case that’s a place to find freedom from the constraints of the social and the political.
In many ways it’s this place in between there. It’s a complicated place, but it’s a really ripe and potent and fecund place, and I think that’s where it can be really incredibly powerful and politically powerful, but it’s also not its responsibility.