Julie Mehretu – Among the Multitude III

Among the Multitude III is a hand-signed, dated, and numbered limited edition digital print in colors on glossy wove paper, from an edition of 130, published by the Berlin art magazine Texte zur Kunst.

It reproduces a 2020–21 acrylic-and-ink painting from Mehretu's Among the Multitude series, shown at carlier | gebauer in Berlin that fall, made by researching news images of immigration detention centers, social upheaval, and ecological disaster, distorting them beyond recognition in Photoshop, and layering the surface with brush, airbrush, and screen-printed marks until the source dissolves into dense, volatile abstraction. Mehretu has described the resulting pictorial space as "a potent space for radical imagination" — work that keeps its political origin legible only as pressure, never as picture.

The edition was released for Texte zur Kunst's March 2022 issue on the "Genres and Gestures of Dissent," following the joint Whitney Museum–LACMA survey that established her as one of the defining abstract painters of her generation.

Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) left the country with her family at age seven, fleeing the political violence of the Derg regime, and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. She is now one of the most significant abstract painters working today, based in New York.

She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College in 1992 and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, followed by residencies at the CORE Program in Houston and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Mehretu builds large, densely layered paintings that combine architectural drawings, city grids, and cartographic marks into compositions that track the buildup of migration, revolution, and social and ecological upheaval over time — abstraction used as a way of holding political material without illustrating it. In 2005 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, and her painting Mural (2008) is installed permanently in the lobby of the Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York.

Her work has been included in Documenta 13 in Kassel (2012) and in a major four-venue traveling retrospective that opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019 before travelling to the High Museum in Atlanta, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; most recently, Ensemble opened at the Palazzo Grassi–Pinault Collection in Venice in 2024. She is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery and White Cube.