Home Journal Artists on Mitchell: Julie Mehretu

Artists on Mitchell: Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu sits in profile in front of a large, blurred abstract painting. She short, dark, curly hair, a medium light skin tone, and wears a navy button up shirt. A smaller abstract artwork with lines and shapes is visible on the wall.
Julie Mehretu, photo by David Heald.

Mitchell's work has always been there for me, since I was a young artist. She's always been this kind of giant of abstraction to me.

I didn't realize that she grew up so much around poetry, and I think it’s really interesting that her paintings look a lot like the written page. To me, they feel that way—the marks—even though she doesn't work on the multi-panel paintings at the same time. You feel like there's this writing across the page or this kind of pushing around, when she's thinking about the structure of something. Even the brush she uses, it's like a writer who doesn't change the pen very often. They're very similar shaped brushes across the surface of a painting.

A person views two large abstract paintings by Joan Mitchell with dominant yellow and orange tones in a spacious, modern art gallery with white walls and a concrete floor. The painting on the left is a large diptych, and on the right is a quadriptych.
Installation view, Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985, David Zwirner, New York, 2022. Photo by Dan Bradica.

Mitchell’s early paintings—like the cityscape paintings—have been so important to me. But then I walked into David Zwirner Gallery [in 2022] and I saw the later paintings. I remember a big yellow painting, I think it's a diptych. I was just astounded by it. And I sat there for a really long time in the gallery looking at that painting.

Large abstract artwork by Julie Mehretu composed of ten panels in a grid, featuring layered, colorful tangled scribbles, lines, and shapes on a white background, mounted on a gallery wall.
Julie Mehretu, This Manifestation of Historical Restlessness, (from Robin's Intimacy), 2022. 10 panels; etching, aquatint. Overall: 94 7/8 x 176 5/8 x 1 5/8 in. (241 x 448.5 x 4 cm). Edition of 28 plus 8 artist's proofs.

Julie Mehretu is an artist based in New York and Berlin. She was a 2003 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. This text is adapted from David Zwirner’s Dialogues podcast: “Joan Mitchell at 100 with Julie Mehretu and Eileen Myles.”