Exhibition
17.03.24 — 06.01.25
Palazzo Grassi

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu Black City, 2007
Close Julie Mehretu Black City, 2007, Pinault Collection. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

JULIE MEHRETU
With Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer, and Jessica Rankin

From 17 March 2024 to 6 January 2025
At Palazzo Grassi

Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Chief Curator, Pinault Collection, with Julie Mehretu

Palazzo Grassi presents a major exhibition dedicated to the work of American artist Julie Mehretu (b.1970, Addis Ababa). This significant exhibition will also interweave the presentation of works by artists who have been part of a circle of close friends or influential collocutors for Mehretu. 

The exhibition brings together Mehretu’s work from a twenty-five-year period, featuring more than sixty works in painting and printmaking, including several of the artist’s recent paintings from 2021-2023. Presented over two floors of Palazzo Grassi, the exhibition includes works from the Pinault Collection, as well as loans from the artist’s collection, international museums and private collections. 

Mehretu’s work will be presented alongside the artists and writers Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin, bringing the field of painting into dialogue with poetry, sculpture, film, voice, and music. Mehretu’s practice has always engaged in various forms of collaboration and sustained conversation with fellow artists. Foregrounding the relationship between intellectual and emotional affinities and artmaking, the exhibition draws a collective portrait of an artistic community in constant dialogue. 

Julie Mehretu’s work is abstract. Her sensual and emotional compositions are imbued with palimpsestic and inventive marks that emerge to the surface from a density of multilayered and complex ideas that originate from her longstanding engagement with the traditions and traces of history and photography. Her references are far-reaching: equally art historical and socio-political, geographical, contemporaneous, and personal. Yet her insistence on the language of abstraction has afforded her the unique emancipatory space for experimentation and expression.

In cooperation with Palazzo Grassi, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf, will present the exhibition in 2025.

Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana are open every day, except on Tuesday, from 10 am to 7 pm.

One admission ticket to visit the exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana:
Full price: €15
Reduced price: €12

Free admission for Members Pinault Collection and visitors under 20

Free admission for residents and students in Venice: on Wednesday, on the first and last day of the exhibition.