Julie Mehretu Quotes

“That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.”

— Julie Mehretu

“I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.”

— Julie Mehretu

“People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven't seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they've seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.”

— Julie Mehretu

“I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.”

— Julie Mehretu

“You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.”

— Julie Mehretu

“When you're not a mom, you can get up in the middle of the night, paint, sleep all morning ... you can't do that when you have two children!”

— Julie Mehretu

“I don't ever work in a way where something is an illustration of an event, but when something is occurring at the same time I see it as very informed by that.”

— Julie Mehretu

Race always comes up in the conversation of Detroit.

— Julie Mehretu

I'm not trying to spell out a story. I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you read the mark is because you also feel the mark.

— Julie Mehretu

“The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies-mapping, charting, and architecture-to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there's only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.”

— Julie Mehretu

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.

— Julie Mehretu

The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.

— Julie Mehretu