Drawing is central to Mehretu’s practice, and the works on paper in this gallery serve in part as an index of the marks that appear in her paintings. They include prints in etching, aquatint, and engraving as well as more gestural and fluid compositions in watercolor and ink that anticipate the figurative elements in some of her more recent paintings. Many painters cover over their preliminary sketches, but Mehretu has always allowed her drawings to remain exposed.

For the diptych Haka (and Riot) Mehretu began with photographs taken inside detention facilities in Texas and California where undocumented migrant children have been detained. The artist blurred and abstracted these images with layer upon layer of digital and physical drawing, painting, airbrushing, and screenprinting, creating a distorted space filled with voids resembling sunken eyes, skulls, and orifices. These cavities seem to coalesce into a powerful, colossal form that suggests exorcism or a dancer performing the haka, a Māori war dance.

In her most recent paintings, Mehretu introduces bold gestural marks and employs a dynamic range of techniques such as airbrushing and screenprinting. The works draw on her archive of media images of major global events such as environmental catastrophes, wars, crises, protests, and abuses of power; she digitally blurs, crops, and rescales this source material, then uses it as the foundation for her paintings, overlaying the images with calligraphic sweeps and loose drawing.

In many of her recent works, Mehretu has confronted extreme global events and their impact on our senses of time, space, and presence. She based Hineni (E. 3:4) on an image of the 2017 Northern California wildfires, while also exploring the burning of Rohingya homes in Myanmar as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The word “hineni” translates to “here I am” in Hebrew, which was Moses’s response to Yahweh (God), who called his name from within the burning bush to tell him he would lead the Israelites in the Exodus to the promised land.

As its title suggests, Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson links disembodied anatomy with a site of violence and political strife. This painting began with a blurred photograph of an unarmed man with his hands up facing a group of police officers in riot gear, which was taken during the protests that followed the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Mehretu layered color over a blurry, sanded black-and-grey background: fuchsia and peachy-pink areas rise from below, while toxic green tones float above, like distant skies drawing near.

In her Invisible Sun paintings, Mehretu moves away from the focus on the city and architecture that characterized her earlier work and instead concentrates on the creative mark and invention itself. Staccato markings and paint smudges resemble graffiti, calligraphy, and even musical notation. Mehretu’s liberated, loose, monochromatic strokes flow over the edges of their canvases, recalling prehistoric cave paintings and suggesting a wide range of possible forms.

In 2013, deeply affected by the Syrian civil war, the spread of the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Mehretu began to move away from architectural drawing and instead use mark making and gesture to further explore violence, resistance, and struggle in her work. For the first time, she incorporated human-scaled figures into her compositions, began to work with new tools, and used her bare hands to push and pull paint.

In Invisible Line (collective), Mehretu presents a densely layered perspective of New York, combining historic, present-day, and unbuilt architectures and both pedestrian and aerial views of the city. By amalgamating these buildings and sightlines, she reduces the metropolis to a gray haze, drawing a connection between architecture and ruins and suggesting the blur of history and time and the buzz of the masses. Mehretu worked feverishly on this painting during the eighteen days of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which she followed on an Al Jazeera livestream in her studio.

While living in Germany in 2008, Mehretu grew increasingly critical of American foreign policy, particularly the Iraq War and the War on Terror. In Berlin, she was surrounded by visible scars of the Holocaust and the Cold War, which pushed her to question her role as an American who opposed the war but nonetheless felt responsible for the terrors afflicted on Iraqi civilians and spaces. Seeking to develop a counternarrative, Mehretu began to incorporate techniques of erasure, opacity, and overwriting into her art practice.

In Stadia II (left) and Black City (right), Mehretu interrogates sports and military typologies to disrupt modern conceptions of leisure, labor, and order. The coliseum, amphitheater, and stadium in Stadia II represent spaces that are designed to situate and organize large numbers of people but also contain an undercurrent of chaos and violence.