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Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is a contemporary visual artist, well known for her large-scale, multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes. Her paintings, drawings, and prints depict the cumulative effects of urban sociopolitical changes through the landscape's alteration of architecture, topography, and iconography.

whose paintings, drawings, and prints are multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes. She is well known for her monumental paintings that depict the visual layout of an urban area or architectural location, often in the context of a cumulative socio-political history and on a monumental scale.

best known for her densely layered abstract paintings, drawings, and prints. Her monumental paintings depict the abstract energy, topography, and sensibility of global urban landscapes, often in the context of a cumulative socio-political history.

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Mehretu was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1997–98) and the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). During a residency at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2003, she worked with thirty high school girls from East Africa. In 2007, she led a monthlong residency program with 40 art students from Detroit public high schools. In the spring of 2007 she was the Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

During her residency in Berlin, Mehretu was commissioned to create seven paintings by the Deutsche Guggenheim; titled Grey Area (2008-2009), the series explores the urban landscape of Berlin as a historical site of generation and destruction. The painting Vanescere (2007), a black-and-white composition that depicts what appears to be a maelstrom of ink and acrylic marks, some of which are sanded away on the surface of the linen support, propelled a layering process of subtraction in the Grey Area series. (cite Sue Scott). Parts of Fragment (2008-09) and Middle Grey (2007-09) feature this erasing technique. Another in the series that was painted in Berlin, Berliner Plätze (2008-09), holds a phantom presence of overlapped outlines of nineteenth-century German buildings that float as a translucent mass in the frame (cite Julie Mehretu: Grey Area). The art historian Sue Scott has this to say of the Grey Area series: "In these somber, simplified tonal paintings, many of which were based on the facades of beautiful nineteenth-century buildings destroyed in World War II, one gets the sense of buildings in the process of disappearing, much like the history of the city she was depicting."

One style is the explosion of shapes and lines; another style is the phantom presence of overlapped architectural outlines floating as a transluscent mass in the frame.

Berliner Platze, part of the Grey Area series,

Fragment (2008-09), Berliner Plätze (2008-09), and Middle Grey (2007-09) are part of the Grey Area series. Mehretu enacts the same subtractive process for Grey Area;

sands away areas of Fragment to to applies the same sanding process to Middle Grey, revealing previous layers in the work to show how she is erasing

The processes of erasing symbolize the handling of Berlin history as well as featuring

Time to add something about a couple other paintings....

In Grey Area