Julie Mehretu in conversation with Camille Houzé

Julie Mehretu is an internationally acclaimed artist whose paintings, drawings and prints have appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Born in Addis Ababa in 1970, she lives and works in New York City. Mehretu's honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2005) and US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). Mehretu is known for her large-scale paintings and drawings and her technique of layering different elements and media. In her highly worked canvases, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal and collective biography. In the last few years, Mehretu's paintings reference political upheaval and social unrest. Most recent solo exhibitions include a mid-career survey of Mehretu's work at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021); The High Museum, Atlanta (2020); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); Other solo shows include Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2019); Centro Botín, Santander, Spain (2018); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2017); Gebre Kristos Desta Center, Addis Ababa (2016); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010) and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009).

Camille Houzé is a curator and art historian based in London, where he has been Research Assistant at the Barbican Art Gallery since 2018, working on Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. He was previously Associate Curator at Kunstraum, London, and has been co-directing the London gallery Nicoletti Contemporary since 2018. He is the author of 'The Swallow and the Dagger', a study of Jean Dubuffet’s late paintings that will be published in the exhibition catalogue Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, in which he also wrote an extensive chronology on the artist. Houzé has an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, completed under the supervision of Professor Sarah Wilson.