Julie Mehretu

American, born Ethiopia, 1970

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, and lives and works in New York City and Berlin. She is best known for her densely layered abstract paintings and prints. Her large-scale paintings take the abstract energy, topography and sensibility of global urban landscapes as a source of inspiration. The artist received a M.F.A. with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and she has received many awards, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship at The American Academy in Berlin, and the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Award. She has shown extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Liminal Squared at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, and White Cube, London; Mind Breath and Beat Drawings at the Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris; Mehretu: Grey Area, Deutsche at the Guggenheim, Berlin, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; and Julie Mehretu: City Sitings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Williams College Art Museum, Massachusetts, and the North Carolina Museum of Art.