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Lot Essay
Monumentally complex, dynamic yet delicate, Kabul by Julie Mehretu is a hauntingly beautiful evocation of urban life. Made in 2013, the work forms part of a compelling series of work that the Ethiopian-born, US-based artist created in response to the Arab Spring of the early 2010s and the protests and revolutions that followed across the world in its wake. Using internet imagery as the source for these canvases, it was the medium through which we come to know these places which fascinated Mehretu. She has said, “I’ve never been to Baghdad, Damascus, Kabul . . . to many places that are part of my paintings,” she says. “But they are part of our shared social narrative. The way we understand these places is through the media, especially when [the US is] engaged in conflict—they are incredibly mediated images. And that interests me” (J. Mehretu, quoted in S. Solondz, “Mehretu’s Revolutions on Canvas”, June 2013, online [accessed: 4/8/2025]) Exhibited in 2013 at London’s White Cube, many other works from this show entered public collections, including the Tate, London, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
Kabul is characteristic of Mehretu’s mesmeric ability to create a composition that guides the viewer to move towards and away from the picture, enticed by how the imagery shifts and transforms depending on the perspective. When seen from a distance, the work appears as ephemeral as a lyrical abstraction. On approach, it defies expectation, revealing itself instead to be a complex palimpsest of exquisitely precise graphite lines, depicting layer upon layer of intricate architectural detail. Stepping away from the canvas once again, it becomes possible to see long individual lines—darker and thicker than the marks beneath it—that dance across the upper surface of the canvas. This additional layer to the image energizes the composition by pulling our eye around the entirety of the picture plane and reminding us that all is not as it seems.
Through careful layering, erasing and obscuring her marks, Mehretu creates an image that is, like the city she references, teeming with unruly individual narratives, events and energies. She has explained: “My initial impulse and investigation was to try and develop, through drawing, a language that could communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having a character, a modus operandi of social behavior. As they continued to grow and develop in the drawing, I wanted to see them layered; to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives" (J. Mehretu quoted in "Interview with David Binkley and Kinsey Katchka," March 28, 2003, online [accessed: 4/8/2025]).
Nearly eight feet tall and twelve feet wide, Kabul demonstrates Mehretu’s masterful handling of scale and her lack of intimidation when it comes to making works on a monumental size. The success of her work at a grand scale is evident in the awe-inspiring pieces she has made for specific places, notably Mural (2009) a 90-foot work created for the lobby of Goldman Sachs, Manhattan and HOWL, eon (I, II), unveiled in 2017 as a long-term installation for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A further work of vast scale called Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts, which was first shown at dOCUMENTA 13, was exhibited alongside Kabul in 2013; its four individual canvases now belong in public collections worldwide.
Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, the revolution that broke out in Ethiopia in 1974 had a deep impact on Mehretu. A few years later, she was airlifted out with her mother, a teacher from America. Her Ethiopian father joined afterwards, and the family settled in East Lansing, Michigan, a place that was previously unfamiliar to them. “It was,” Mehretu has said, “a huge break that has forever left an imprint on me.” Throughout her career as an artist, she has consistently been drawn to explore the impact of political environments on space and time. Speaking the year that Kabul was made, she described how “Within the revolutionary impulse there typically exists an idealism and a desire for the impossible. These core aspects are processed in my studio through a highly pressurized distillation system with loud music and beats. The hand marks, flings, percussive chops, and morphs build something entirely different: an unknown” (J. Mehretu, quoted in “Julie Mehretu on her new work and exhibitions,” Artforum, May 2013).
Kabul’s abundance of marks coalesce and dissipate into concrete and imagined forms before our eyes. Neither representative or abstract, Mehretu opens up a new visual realm that synthesizes global history, geography and politics with subjective and emotional lives. This space is not without hope. She has said, “As these different architectures become immersed in the mark, they create together what I refer to as a third place, a new possibility.” (J. Mehretu, quoted in ibid).
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT
Kabul is characteristic of Mehretu’s mesmeric ability to create a composition that guides the viewer to move towards and away from the picture, enticed by how the imagery shifts and transforms depending on the perspective. When seen from a distance, the work appears as ephemeral as a lyrical abstraction. On approach, it defies expectation, revealing itself instead to be a complex palimpsest of exquisitely precise graphite lines, depicting layer upon layer of intricate architectural detail. Stepping away from the canvas once again, it becomes possible to see long individual lines—darker and thicker than the marks beneath it—that dance across the upper surface of the canvas. This additional layer to the image energizes the composition by pulling our eye around the entirety of the picture plane and reminding us that all is not as it seems.
Through careful layering, erasing and obscuring her marks, Mehretu creates an image that is, like the city she references, teeming with unruly individual narratives, events and energies. She has explained: “My initial impulse and investigation was to try and develop, through drawing, a language that could communicate different types of narratives and build a cityscape, each mark having a character, a modus operandi of social behavior. As they continued to grow and develop in the drawing, I wanted to see them layered; to build a different kind of dimension of space and time into the narratives" (J. Mehretu quoted in "Interview with David Binkley and Kinsey Katchka," March 28, 2003, online [accessed: 4/8/2025]).
Nearly eight feet tall and twelve feet wide, Kabul demonstrates Mehretu’s masterful handling of scale and her lack of intimidation when it comes to making works on a monumental size. The success of her work at a grand scale is evident in the awe-inspiring pieces she has made for specific places, notably Mural (2009) a 90-foot work created for the lobby of Goldman Sachs, Manhattan and HOWL, eon (I, II), unveiled in 2017 as a long-term installation for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A further work of vast scale called Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts, which was first shown at dOCUMENTA 13, was exhibited alongside Kabul in 2013; its four individual canvases now belong in public collections worldwide.
Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, the revolution that broke out in Ethiopia in 1974 had a deep impact on Mehretu. A few years later, she was airlifted out with her mother, a teacher from America. Her Ethiopian father joined afterwards, and the family settled in East Lansing, Michigan, a place that was previously unfamiliar to them. “It was,” Mehretu has said, “a huge break that has forever left an imprint on me.” Throughout her career as an artist, she has consistently been drawn to explore the impact of political environments on space and time. Speaking the year that Kabul was made, she described how “Within the revolutionary impulse there typically exists an idealism and a desire for the impossible. These core aspects are processed in my studio through a highly pressurized distillation system with loud music and beats. The hand marks, flings, percussive chops, and morphs build something entirely different: an unknown” (J. Mehretu, quoted in “Julie Mehretu on her new work and exhibitions,” Artforum, May 2013).
Kabul’s abundance of marks coalesce and dissipate into concrete and imagined forms before our eyes. Neither representative or abstract, Mehretu opens up a new visual realm that synthesizes global history, geography and politics with subjective and emotional lives. This space is not without hope. She has said, “As these different architectures become immersed in the mark, they create together what I refer to as a third place, a new possibility.” (J. Mehretu, quoted in ibid).
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT