20th BMW Art Car with Julie Mehretu Debuts in Paris

The 20th BMW Art Car was presented to the public for the first time on May 21st, 2024 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Designed by renowned New York-based contemporary artist Julie Mehretu, the project transforms the BMW M Hybrid V8 race car into a performative work of art, continuing a longstanding tradition of BMW Art Cars and competitive racing. Just a few weeks after its World Premiere in the French capital, the newest edition in the storied BMW Art Car collection will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

“The whole BMW Art Car project is about invention, about imagination, about pushing limits of what can be possible. I don’t think of this car as something you would exhibit. I am thinking of it as something that will race in Le Mans. It’s a performative painting. My BMW Art Car was created in close collaboration with motorsport and engineering teams,” says Julie Mehretu. “The BMW Art Car is only completed once the race is over.”

Learn more about the BMW Art Car here!

Julie Mehretu Unveils 'Ensemble' at Palazzo Grassi in Venice

“From March 17th, 2024, to January 6th, 2025, Palazzo Grassi in Venice hosts Ensemble, Europe’s most extensive exhibition of Julie Mehretu’s art to date. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, the Pinault Collection’s Chief Curator, in collaboration with Mehretu herself, the exhibit showcases over fifty pieces spanning 25 years, encompassing paintings and prints, including her latest works from 2021-2024. Spanning two floors, the show features 17 pieces from the Pinault Collection alongside loans from global museums and private collectors.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition are pieces by Mehretu’s closest artist friends, with whom she shares a profound connection cultivated over the years through collaboration and exchange. The exhibition, designed around visual resonance, offers a non-linear exploration of Mehretu’s oeuvre. designboom had the privilege of experiencing the exhibition firsthand, delving into Mehretu’s artistic journey to understand how it came into being and is constantly renewed.”

Read more about the exhibition on Designboom here!

Images by Marco Cappelletti © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection

On Julie Mehretu's Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, by Susan Tallman

The tricky bit of sublimity, Edmund Burke acknowledged in 1757, is the balance between profusion and disorder: we feel awe at the night sky because “the stars lie in such apparent confusion as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity.” But to artists who would seek to imitate this effect, Burke issued a caution: “unless you can produce an appearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder only.” The works of art that succeed at this game “owe their sublimity to a richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to the exact coherence and agreement of the allusions.”

The sublime, in Burke’s sense of aesthetic experience entangled with peril, has often been invoked in relation to the careening, elegant mayhem of Julie Mehretu’s art. The superfluity of images that tumble across her prints and paintings succeed in defying “exact coherence,” even while suggesting elusive relationships of vast design. But where earlier painters found the requisite menace and majesty in storms at sea and vertiginous mountainscapes (J.M.W. Turner is the poster boy here), Mehretu’s topography is geopolitical. She has described herself as a “child of a failed revolution” (her Ethiopian-American family relocated to Michigan as the post-Selassie nation devolved into a bloody quagmire), and the opposing forces that drive her abstractions—energy and entropy, construction and destruction—have been soldiers in every campaign ever waged for utopia. 

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha

Mehretu’s infinity unfolds in layers, each rooted in a different way of thinking about the world and a different way of drawing it. Her marks may be fuzzy or lapidary, may swoop like a raptor or stammer like scuffs on a drum head, their relationships chafe as well as bind. As a graduate student she thought of her gathered lines as “social agents.” Even in painting her working habits—drawing, separation, layering, relocation—are endemic to printmaking, and it is not surprising that she has proved to be a prolific and virtuosic printmaker, collaborating with eminent print workshops on both sides of the Atlantic, almost always in etching. ¹ Her projects with Highpoint are the exception. ²

In her new prints and two earlier ones from 2003-4, Mehretu stepped away from etching’s airs and graces in favor of screenprint and lithography, once-commercial methods whose virtues include deadpan flatness and an aura of real-world plausibility. Her very first print with Highpoint, Entropia (review), features twenty-eight colors of screenprinted ink splashing east and west like the parting of a psychedelic Red Sea. Line drawings in long arcs, staccato bursts and curling filaments float in and around the spray, along with modernist architectural renderings agleam with the blithe promise of a better future. The print, like all her work, is the product of staged accretion. It began with a sixteen-layer drawing in Photoshop from which sixteen printing screens were made. She then made four further drawings on translucent mylar for lithographic plates to capture greater tonal nuance and detail. To reach the final composition, further colors were added during proofing, including translucent white layers to provide an atmospheric perspective akin to the clear acrylic layers in her related paintings).

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha

In the meantime, however, Highpoint master printer Cole Rogers had been smitten with the appearance of Mehretu’s translucent black-and-white drawings stacked on their own. He suggested printing each of the litho plates on a separate sheet of Gampi (a thin Japanese paper), and mounting them one over the other. Pleased with the result, Mehretu tweaked the composition by adding a fourth lithographic plate. In both prints, the viewer is suspended in ambiguous space, but in Entropia (Construction), this disorientation is augmented by an eerie sense of sagittal depth, of things at a distance seen through not-quite-transparent air.

Julie Mehretu, 2022, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (smoke), Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (blue)

Seventeen years later, the arrival of Mehretu’s mid-career retrospective at the Walker Art Center provided an opportunity to revisit screenprint and lithography with Highpoint. She had since moved away from the kind of architectonic line drawing that underpinned the Entropia prints; photographs shot at points of jeopardy: border crossings, political protests, wildfires. Reduced to pulsing clouds of color, the action is impossible to identify in terms of location or protagonists, but even (or perhaps especially) in this state, Mehretu saw curious echoes of European grand manner history painting—a kind of formal structure and moral swagger that can be traced from Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) to Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) and beyond. Her hand-drawn overlays had also changed, growing looser and more expressive, and now swept like dark squalls across the new bokeh backdrops.  

The new project began with a photograph of a striding protester carrying an inverted American flag and backlit by a liquor store in flames, a scene captured by AP photographer Julio Cortez four days after the murder of George Floyd and two miles due east of Highpoint, on the corner of Lake Street and Minnehaha in Minneapolis. The event was real, but were it a painting, it would have owed much to Eugène Delacroix’s exemplar of heroic hokum, Liberty Leading the People (1830), with its barefoot and bare-breasted (why?), heroine marching over a pile of corpses, the tricolor held aloft in her right hand, a bayonet in her left, while saber-rattling Frenchmen take up the rear amid martial smoke.³ The Minneapolis protester carries a bottle rather than a bayonet, but the flag, the fire, and the phoenix-like equation of destruction with rebirth attest to a continuum of political hope and rage.

Mehretu cropped the photograph, then flipped it upside down and blurred it. Though in etching she had used photo-blurs of almost diaphanous refinement, in screenprint she aimed for a coarser print terrain. In most industrial printing, all the colors of the rainbow are approximated through dots in four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (or “key,” giving the process its acronym “CMYK”). The dots wax and wane in size in accordance with the colors they aim to replicate, but are regularly spaced in four interlocking grids. If the grids are fine enough, the trick works seamlessly: a speck of blue sits next to a speck of magenta, and the viewer thinks “violet.” When the resolution is less refined, weirder things happen.

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha

Oversized “Ben Day” dots were a trope of Pop art, a tool that turned the workings of mass media into subject matter, but while Mehretu’s enlarged dot screen can be seen as a nod to photojournalism, she was less interested in the dots per se than in the visual pitter-patter of those grids as a battleground for drawing. The soft blurs now calcified into jittery rosettes of spots. Omitting the “key” black component produced a porous structure with a kind of visual tooth, while the edgy snap of screenprint means that each component reads as a discreet entity (every dot is an island, entire of itself). Over this she drew three layers of addenda, each for a different screen, each screen printed in a different black (yellow-black, purple-black, and flat black). Finally, small bursts of color were peppered on top, like flickering halations. 

The dot-screen colors of Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (co-published with the Walker Art Center) reflects the incendiary palette of the original photograph (and of Minneapolis in June 2020). Her drawing layers, smoky and diffuse, operate less as strata than as currents, flowing through one another and backwards and forward in space. Each was executed with different drawing technique: one with wispy airbrush strokes; another with swift feathered marks in the manner of sumi-e brushwork; the last as a computer “dither” drawing, with spray-paint-like splotches and the kind of clean-edged wormholes familiar to anyone who has ever played with the eraser tool in Photoshop.

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (blue)

In the digital world, “dither” denotes the application of stochastic interference to disrupt unwanted patterns that arise when continuous information is quantized. The crude color chunks that show up in low-contrast digital images, for example, can be broken up with a spray of random dots; in sound recording, inaudible amounts of white noise can obliterate the phantom tones produced when slightly different data points are rounded to the same value. Dither, somewhat poetically, is noise as a means to quiet. Mehretu’s dither drawing is not there to fix an error but—like the jangly checkerboard of CMY dots and the quixotic fall of ink from bristles—to defy and subvert the temptations of a single coherent storyline.

In the wider world, “dither” means something else—an indulgent indecision or cozy species of panic. In both senses, it is a cousin to Burke’s dazzle: an agent of confusion endowed with strange aesthetic powers and possible wisdom. The perception of phantom patterns within complex events, after all, is the defining feature of conspiracy theories. And a mind “so dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to the exact coherence and agreement of the allusions” is a mind able to accept complexity without resorting to fables.

Detail, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (smoke)

Burke wrote his treatise on the sublime as a young man, but for most of his life he was a politician, and his long career in Parliament encompassed both the American Revolution (he was sympathetic to the colonists) and the French (he admired the spirit and was appalled by the execution). Mehretu, the child of a more recent, failed revolution, has made herself a poet of the social sublime—the dithering, dazzling spectacle of humanity’s infinitely hopeful, endlessly myopic designs for the world. “The compositional and structural issues in my work are directly tied to the desire to take up arms and lead revolution,” she told Phong Bui around the time she began working on these prints. “But my effort is to question these gestures, to take these myths apart.”⁴

— Susan Tallman

1. These workshops include: Greg Burnet Editions (New York, 2000--); Crown Point Press (2005-2007); Gemini G.E.L. (Los Angeles, 2008--); Niels Borch Jensen (Copenhagen, 2014--).

2. While uses screenprint in her paintings, her only screenprint editions have been with Highpoint, and her only other lithographic projects have been two benefit prints with the lithographer Maurice Sanchez.

3. The standard explanation for Liberty’s costume is that it separates her from the “real” people in everyday dress, and thus identifies her as the symbolic Marianne, the personification of French liberty, though most Mariannes managed to keep their tops on.

4. Brooklyn Rail interview 21 April 21

Susan Tallman is a writer, critic and art historian living in Massachusetts and Berlin. She has written extensively on contemporary art, the history of prints, and other aspects of art and culture. A regular contributor to New York Review of Books among other publications, she has authored and co-authored many books, most recently No Plan At All: How the Danish Printshop of Niels Borch Jensen Redefined Artists Prints for the Contemporary World. In 2011 she co-founded the journal Art in Print, and served as its Editor-in-Chief until its closure in 2019. 

Educated at Wesleyan and Columbia Universities, she is Adjunct Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and sits on the Editorial Board of Print Quarterly. (And, yes, she was a founding member of the New York guitar band Band of Susans.)

For inquiries about Julie Mehretu’s prints, please contact the Gallery Director: sara@highpointprintmaking.org.

Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, new print by Julie Mehretu

Highpoint Editions is proud to release the newest print by artist Julie Mehretu, Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, a co-publication which has been made through support of the artistic programs of Walker Art Center and Highpoint Editions.

This year marks the 18th anniversary of the release of one of Mehretu’s earliest prints [Entropia (review)], co-published by Highpoint Editions and the Walker in 2004.

View fullsize

Corner of Lake and Minnehaha, 2022
Julie Mehretu
17-run Screenprint on white Coventry Rag paper
47" x 37" image size
54 ¾" x 43 ½" paper size
Edition of 45

Current events and unfolding histories have long informed Mehretu’s practice. Her most recent works are propelled by her reaction to urgent crises in our present moment, and how the media’s framing of these conditions impacts society. From the incessant stream of daily imagery we consume of violence, injustice, warfare, and environmental disasters, Mehretu seeks out resonant photographs—of fires raging simultaneously in California and Myanmar in 2017, for example; or in the case of this print, an image from the civil unrest in Minneapolis on May 28, 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. These photographic sources, which Mehretu alters by digitally blurring, rotating, and cropping them, become the ground of her recent works. The artist then builds upon these in layers by marking over them with her own gestures to create visually and conceptually complex abstractions.

Working with Master Printer Cole Rogers and the team of printers at Highpoint Editions, Mehretu developed this work into a 17-run screenprint. This ambitious print combines a halftone dot pattern in Cyan, Magenta and Yellow along with drawings by the artist that are layered one by one in various tones of black and colored inks.

— Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts

Pricing and availability can be found here, or you may contact jehra@highpointprintmaking.org or info@highpointprintmaking.org

For further reading, click here for writer, art critic and historian Susan Tallman’s essay on Corner of Lake and Minnehaha.