The “courtship” between Julie Mehretu and Gemini began with a small drypoint etching created in 2008 to raise funds for Senator Obama’s presidential campaign, and a second small-scale print benefitting the Guggenheim Museum in 2010. Feeling confident in the relationship with Masterprinter Case Hudson and his team of etchers, ever since then the artist has challenged the technical and visual limits of the workshop with three monumental bodies of work. This exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of all thirteen editions that Julie Mehretu has created in collaboration with the Los Angeles-based publisher.

Oftentimes prints by artists are treated as somehow separate from the rest of their unique output, but this is not the case with Mehretu. Printmaking informs her paintings and the paintings inform her printmaking in a reciprocal and intertwined manner – explicitly in the use of screenprinting in her paintings, and implicitly in the way that printmaking forces a slowed-down deliberation and dissection of the personal mark-making for which Mehretu is celebrated. The technical parallels between constructing an image in layers, as is necessary with printmaking, and the way that Mehretu builds her paintings through a stratum of imagery that is blurred and transformed, underscores the symbiotic relationship between the two mediums.