Julie Mehretu (born November 28, 1970) is an Ethiopian American contemporary visual artist, known for her multi-layered paintings of abstracted landscapes on a large scale.

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, the first child of an Ethiopian college professor of geography and a Jewish American Montessori teacher.

[1][2]: 215 A graduate of East Lansing High School, Mehretu received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and did a junior year abroad at Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal, then attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1997.

[5] The pieces do not contain any formal, consistent sense of depth, instead utilizing multiple points of view and perspective ratios to construct flattened re-imaginings of city life.

[7] In 2002, Mehretu said of her work: I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency.

[9] Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts (2012), the collective name for four monumental canvases that were included in dOCUMENTA (13), relates to 'Al-Mogamma', the name of the all purpose government building in Tahrir Square, Cairo, which was both instrumental in the 2011 revolution and architecturally symptomatic of Egypt's post-colonial past.

Another painting, Insile (2013) built up from a photo image of Believers' Palace amid civilian buildings, activates its surface with painterly ink gestures, blurring and effacing the ruins beneath.

Calvin Tomkins of the New Yorker called it "the most ambitious painting I've seen in a dozen years",[1] and another commentator described it as "one of the largest and most successful public art works in recent times".

She has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across America, among them Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Crown Point Press in San Francisco, Gemini G.E.L.

[2]: 221  The painting Vanescere (2007), a black-and-white composition that depicts what appears to be a maelstrom of ink and acrylic marks, some of which are sanded away on the surface of the linen support, propelled a layering process of subtraction in the Grey Area series.

[19] Presented at Harlem Parish as part of the Performa 17 biennial, MASS (HOWL, eon) took the audience on an intensive tour of Mehretu's canvas while musicians played the composition by Moran.

The 85 foot (26 m) tall artwork, Uprising of the Sun, is inspired by a quote from Barack Obama delivered in a speech at a memorial ceremony for the civil-rights-era

[25] In 2023, German automaker BMW selected Mehretu to paint its annual "art car" for entry at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race.

[30] In 2016, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Mehretu to create a diptych, with each massive painting flanking the staircase in the atrium which is accessible and free to the public.

[55][56] HOWL, eon (I, II) is a political commentary on the history of the western United States' landscape, including the San Francisco Bay Area.

The foundation of each work contains digitally abstracted photos from recent race riots, street protests, and nineteenth-century images of the American West.

[69] Lehmann saw that several Mehretu pieces available in the catalog of the Walker Art Center had been sold to collector Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, and suspected that the agreement was not being kept.

[72] The case, eventually won by Lehmann, revealed to a wider public precisely what prices and discounts galleries offer various collectors on paintings by Mehretu and other contemporary artists – information normally concealed by the art world.

[69] In October 2023, Mehretu broke the auction record for an African artist at Sotheby's Hong Kong, with her piece Untitled (2001), which sold for $9.32 million.