Mehretu’s individual paintings have climbed to a height of twenty-seven feet (“HOWL,” “eon (I, II),” 2017), numbered hundreds of shades of colors (“Mural,” 2009) (each reportedly labeled and archived by Mehretu during the composition process) and comprised incalculable numbers of digital photographs, architectural renderings, contemporary signs and symbols and micrographic gestures and characters at the same time, her paintings have synthesized and collaged an immense miscellany of social, political and artistic histories, including Paleolithic mark-making, Enlightenment-era and Beaux Art architecture, midcentury world-building utopianism, postcolonial revolutionary movements and accelerationist fantasies of apocalypse.

Of the many rapturous descriptors employed by art critics and historians to situate the twenty-five-year oeuvre of post-painterly abstractionist Julie Mehretu, one that reappears frequently is that of vast, in terms of both its intellectual moorings and material scale.

COACH coat, MONCLER t-shirt, and TIFFANY & CO.

Abstract background soundwaves