1. Julie Mehretu, KAIROS / Hauntological Variations, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photo: Achim Kukulies
Julie Mehretu: layers of fire, memory, and resistance
The exhibition presented at K21 in Düsseldorf, titled KAIROS / Hauntological Variations, offers a dense and complete journey through the works of Julie Mehretu. This Ethiopian American artist, born in Addis Ababa in 1970, has over the past two decades developed a complex body of painting haunted by political narratives, geopolitical shifts, contemporary violence, and the possibilities of reinvention through abstraction.
Following an initial presentation at the Pinault Collection in Venice, under the title Julie Mehretu. Ensemble, the project arrives in Germany with a more introspective and expanded approach.
2. Julie Mehretu, KAIROS / Hauntological Variations, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photo: Achim Kukulies
The presentation at K21 marks Mehretu's first major retrospective in Germany. It brings together nearly 100 works, including monumental paintings, drawings, prints, previously unseen working documents, and time-based media inspired by her practice: music, video, and archives. The exhibition does not merely trace the chronological evolution of her career, but it immerses the viewer in the processes of deconstruction and reconfiguration at the heart of her image-making.
Developed in collaboration with the Pinault Collection, the exhibition emphasis is placed on gesture, technique, and the successive layering that transforms raw images into vibrating abstraction. The notion of “hauntology,” borrowed from Jacques Derrida (Spectres de Marx, 1993), finds visual resonance here: the painting as trace, as ghost, as active archive of a derealized time.
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3. Julie Mehretu, Untitled (2005 drawings), 2005, Ink, Graphite, gouache and watercolor on paper, 26 × 40 inches /66 × 101,6 cm, Private Collection, Photo: Erma Estwick © Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu's work; building with ruins
Julie Mehretu’s practice hinges on a dialogue between structure and collapse. Her training in architecture and drawing underpins her compositions, even when they seem to explode into near-chaotic gestural fields. She does not paint real places, but rather affective topographies, cartographies of conflict, extinguished utopias, social movements, and natural or political catastrophes.
The process itself is central to her approach. Mehretu overlays layers of drawing, ink, acrylic, finger marks, spray paint, and airbrush. She often starts with a source image, press photography, satellite images, war archives, which she manipulates on a computer into near abstraction. She then applies numerous layers of paint and ink, sanding, masking, and sealing them to create saturated, ambiguous surfaces, both readable and opaque, abstract and politically charged.
Series and layers
The corpus presented in Düsseldorf is organized by series that reflect the successive evolutions of Mehretu’s works. Rather than a strict chronological order, the exhibition creates visual echoes across periods, highlighting both continuity and rupture in her artistic development.
2001 to 2011: cartographies and cities in crisis
During this period, Mehretu developed her signature technique of layering architectural schematics, urban plans, and geopolitical diagrams with gestural mark-making. She used projections as source materials, such as stadiums, airports, and civic buildings, which she traced onto canvas in acrylic or ink. These underlying structures were overlaid with rapid drawing, often using pencil, ink, gouache, and airbrushed acrylic.
The compositions were built in successive strata: vector-based lines formed the framework, while gestural marks introduced a sense of chaos and movement. Many of these works are monumental in scale, sometimes over five meters long, and were executed on canvas mounted to custom-built aluminum or wooden stretchers.
The work of this decade reflects a deliberate interplay between order and disorder, evoking the instability of globalized urban space. The references remain non-figurative, but rooted in real-world architecture and planning documents. Works from this phase were largely produced in New York and during Mehretu’s residencies in Berlin, including at the American Academy in 2007.
2012 to 2016: ghosts of war and political grisaille
In this phase, Mehretu's paintings shifted toward a more subdued, grayscale palette dominated by tones of grey, black, white, and beige. The previously architectural vectors are now submerged or removed entirely, replaced by vaporous atmospheres and gestural traces.
She began incorporating digitally manipulated press images, often related to war zones or sites of protest, which she abstracted through blurring and inversion. These manipulated photographs were then inkjet printed or projected onto the canvas and used as a guide for building up thin washes of acrylic.
Mehretu increasingly used airbrush techniques to create soft, diffused areas that suggest smoke, fog, or erasure. The gestural elements became more calligraphic and fragmented, often resembling scratches, smears, and partial inscriptions. The presence of the human figure was introduced in the form of ghosted impressions, mouths, arms, torsos, sometimes created by transferring prints or using frottage techniques. Her compositions became quieter and more vertical in format.
2016 to 2021: chromatic abstraction and digital archives
Starting in 2016, Mehretu adopted a new foundational strategy: selecting press and documentary images from current events, such as climate disasters, uprisings, and police violence, and digitally blurring them in Photoshop.
These blurred photographs were inkjet printed onto canvas or directly projected and used as compositional grounds. On top of these, she applied acrylic with airbrush, brushed washes, or scraping tools. She also added lines with graphite, colored pencil, and ink, which fractured the picture plane. Color returned strongly in this phase, particularly with acidic or metallic hues : orange, blue, magenta, yellow which contrasted with the muted greys of the base layer.
The paintings remained large, some measuring several meters in width and height. In this period, her work combined digital photography, classical abstraction, and graffiti-like expression in a single surface.
2018 to 2019: the fire of memory
4. Julie Mehretu, KAIROS / Hauntological Variations, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photo: Achim Kukulies
This brief but pivotal period is defined by Mehretu’s response to cultural destruction, particularly following the fire at Brazil’s National Museum. The source materials included photographs of the event that she blurred, color-inverted, and cropped digitally before integrating them into her compositions.
The base of the painting often began with these inkjet-printed images on canvas, followed by layers of airbrushed acrylic and hand-drawn marks. Compared to earlier work, these canvases emphasized surface depth and material density. Her use of sanding tools increased, allowing her to reveal or erase previous layers with precision. The colors were often warm and atmospheric : ochre, orange, black, violet, evoking soot, fire, and residue without literal depiction. The formal composition tended to center less on line and more on chromatic diffusion. She also experimented with varnishing and semi-gloss finishes to create visual shifts depending on the viewer’s position.
2019 to 2022: pandemic silences and absent crowds
This period reflects a shift in scale, rhythm, and sensibility due to the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mehretu’s works became more vertical or portrait-oriented, with dimensions that suggested bodies or thresholds. Her color palette turned toward cool blues, pale greens, whites, and transparent layers. The process still began with digitally manipulated photographic images, but the interventions became lighter and more atmospheric.
Her use of the airbrush intensified, generating fine, cloud-like overlays. Drawing became more intimate, with softer graphite lines and dispersed marks. Some compositions included gestures made with the hands or imprints transferred through indirect methods. While the underlying image often remained barely visible, the surface suggested themes of distance, protection, and vanishing. Masking tape and stencils were used with greater subtlety.
2021 to 2024: political ghosts and abstract exodus
5. Julie Mehretu, KAIROS / Hauntological Variations, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photo: Achim Kukulies
Mehretu’s most recent works synthesize techniques from earlier periods while experimenting with transparency, modular formats, and suspended surfaces. She continues to work from digitally blurred images of political crises such as conflicts, uprisings, or acts of surveillance but now places greater emphasis on movement, opacity, and escape.
The process often involves printing source imagery onto polyester or translucent mesh substrates, which are then layered, folded, or hung. Her TRANSpaintings, made in collaboration with sculptor Nairy Baghramian, push the painting off the wall and into the exhibition space.
These works are built with multiple surfaces, including plexiglas, synthetic fabrics, or unprimed canvas. They are painted with airbrush, pencil, ink, and marker, often suspended in space to allow light and air to pass through. Transparency becomes a structural feature, not just a surface effect. Some pieces are mounted on aluminum frames or double-sided supports. Rather than illustrating political content, these works embody the idea of fugitivity of abstraction as a form of refusal and transformation. They represent Mehretu’s most materially complex and sculpturally ambitious works to date.
Biographical summary
Julie Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970. In 1977, her family fled the military regime and settled in East Lansing, Michigan, where her father taught political science. She studied at Kalamazoo College (BA, 1992), including a formative year at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. She earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, followed by a residency at the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
After moving to New York, she began exhibiting with The Project gallery. In 2001, she gained major recognition through the “Freestyle” exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her solo shows have included Walker Art Center (2003), MoMA (2010), and the Whitney Biennial (2004). In 2005, she received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.
Mehretu is known for her large-scale commissions, including a monumental mural for Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York (2009). Her work is held in major international collections, including MoMA, the Whitney, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and LACMA. She currently lives and works between New York and Berlin.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: K 21
Date: 10.5.2025 – 12.10.2025
Curators: Susanne Meyer-Büser and Sebastien Peter
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
K21
Ständehausstraße 1
40217 Düsseldorf
Phone: +49 211 83 81 204
Mail: service@kunstsammlung.de