The Emotional Magnitude of Julie Mehretu's Düsseldorf Retrospective

To enter Düsseldorf’s K21, the only state-funded museum dedicated to international contemporary art in Germany’s Nordrhein-Westfalen region, is to travel through time by way of the mid-career retrospective of Julie Mehretu. Nearly 100 works coalesce into the narrative of the Addis Ababa-born, New York-based artist’s stylistic development, as well as the circumstances that have informed her practice. These mesmeric works range from line drawings created in the 1990s to recent, large-scale abstract paintings and various never-before-exhibited pieces.

Due to the expansive, emotion-laden nature of the survey, viewers cannot help but wonder if, in seeing the exhibition herself, Mehretu questions the present, physical experience—the lighting, the placement, the dialogue between works—or if she see sees it all through a lens of the past, among the sparks of inspiration that led to each mark. “It’s both,” she tells Surface. “Sometimes there are these moments where the memories come together, and they are really of the past. Other times, I feel like new relationships are made with the work.”

“When you enter, you have these glimpses—from the very early drawings to the early archive pages to one of the most recent paintings,” she continues. “As you walk, you get to see a glimmer of the TRANSpaintings.” The latter, a visually arresting series staged in a room on the same level as the outdoor pond, which is visible beyond porthole-like windows, is a collaboration with the German Iranian artist Nairy Baghramian. Her industrial sculptures cradle Mehretu’s translucent, gestural works.

Though Mehretu initially worried that there would be too much for viewers to engage with, she quickly observed the show’s lightness. This airy openness leaves room for museum guests to ponder over pivotal works like 2007’s sprawling, ornate Black City or 2019/2020’s moody, evocative about the space of half an hour, which references a line in the Book of Revelation about the apocalypse.

Professor Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer, the museum’s director, curated the show. Prior to her tenure, K21 had no women artists in its permanent collection. With her annual budget, she began to change that (even acquiring a Louise Bourgeois recently), while orchestrating shows like a forthcoming queer artist survey and the Mehretu exhibition.

“It is not only a collection of very impressive paintings,” Gaensheimer tells Surface of “KAIROS / Hauntological Variations.” “It is also very much about the time we are living in. The chronology is interesting as well, because all that has happened in the world has made Julie the person she is.”

The exhibition also includes Mehretu’s original maquette of her BMW Art Car #20; and it follows the announcement of the African Film and Media Arts Collective (AFMAC), a first-of-its-kind cultural extension of the Art Car program. Developed in collaboration with Mehretu’s longtime friend Mehret Mandefro, it began with filmic workshops in Lagos this April, and will extend to Dakar, Tangier, Nairobi, and Cape Town. The pan-African initiative will culminate in an exhibition at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa curated by Koyo Kouoh.

AFMAC will incorporate a permanent form of intellectual and cultural archive that includes an artist network across the African continent. “We always wanted to leave behind some form of infrastructural work,” Mehretu explains. “Our desire is this pedagogical approach to making. That’s where art pushes limits, when it is being made for one another, in conversation with one another.” At this continental scale, an ambitious program like this is only possible with resources like those which BMW provides, though Mehretu’s approach is local. “We are working with grassroots organizations,” she says, “and with artists selected by open calls or by the lead artists themselves.”