Palazzo Grassi presents a large exhibition project dedicated to the work of the American artist Julie Mehretu (1970, Addis Ababa), curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with the artist herself. The exhibition includes works created by artists who are part of a circle of Julie Mehretu's close friends or personalities who influenced her.

The exhibition brings together over sixty paintings and etchings by Julie Mehretu made during a twenty-five year period, including many of the paintings created by the artist between 2021 and 2023. Presented on the two exhibition floors of Palazzo Grassi, the exhibition includes works from the Pinault Collection , as well as loans from the artist's collection, international museums and private collections.

The artists and authors who support Julie Mehretu's work are Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Robin Coste Lewis, Tacita Dean, David Hammons, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin, placing painting in dialogue with poetry, sculpture, cinema, the voice and the music. Julie Mehretu's practice is characterized by various forms of collaboration and sustained conversation with other artists. By foregrounding the relationship between intellectual and emotional affinities and artistic production, the exhibition draws a collective portrait of an artistic community in constant dialogue.

Julie Mehretu's work is abstract. His compositions, sensual and emotional, are imbued with imaginative traces and signs that emerge to the surface from a density of complex and layered ideas that originate in his long-standing engagement with the traditions and traces of history and photography. His references are far-reaching: art history, sociopolitics, geography, current events and private life. Yet, her insistence on the language of abstraction has offered her a uniquely emancipatory space for experimentation and expression.