Mehretu on Drawing

Drawing is central to Mehretu’s practice, and the works on paper in this gallery serve in part as an index of the marks that appear in her paintings. They include prints in etching, aquatint, and engraving as well as more gestural and fluid compositions in watercolor and ink that anticipate the figurative elements in some of her more recent paintings. Many painters cover over their preliminary sketches, but Mehretu has always allowed her drawings to remain exposed. “As I continue drawing,” she observed in 2002, “I find myself more and more interested in the idea that drawing can be an activist gesture. That drawing—as an informed, intuitive process, a process that is representative of individual agency and culture, a very personal process—offers something radical.”