‘We Were Following Each Other’: Julie Mehretu and Nairy Baghramian on Friendship

Nairy Baghramian I have a very vivid and beautiful memory of you from when I first arrived in New York in 2017. It was at [our gallerist] Marian Goodman’s apartment, which always feels so cozy, and there you were sitting at the breakfast table.

Julie Mehretu Yes, I remember that very clearly. Marian was making eggs – very, very slowly. They took forever. There was this very deliberate sensibility to nurture the moment and not cut it short.

NB It was like we had endless time together. She introduced us and it didn’t take long for me to realize that this would become a very close and deep friendship. Marian’s presence made it feel almost like a ménage à trois: she was part of the moment, but not entirely involved.

JM Yes. I felt the same way. I remember thinking, ‘Where has this woman been my whole life?’

NB Exactly.

JM A couple of years later, we spent quite a bit of time together installing our work at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019; hanging out, talking about art, looking at things, laughing – lots of laughing.

NB We found each other getting lost in Venice.

JM You were following me and I was following you, but neither of us knew where we were going!

NB Do you think our friendship has evolved alongside our respective practices?

JM Well, for me, there is always this natural connection between who you are as a person and who you are as an artist: they flow into one another. While we were in Venice, I was working on my house in New York, and I’d show you pictures of the renovation. And then you’d say, ‘Are these the door handles the architects are suggesting? No, no, no! I’ll make them for you.’ It was this kind of naturally evolving conversation – whether about love, family or the political situation – that embedded a form of creative living within our friendship.

NB The way you asked me about the door handles wasn’t banal: it was more a question about how we shape our lives. As a sculptor, how could I not respond to something that you’re asking about form, function and life? Those little handles became a collaborative creation between us.

JM That’s how I think of you moving through the world – this idea of shaping or forming life. One of the things that really stayed with me from our trip to Venice, was this letter you sent me afterwards about how you were thinking of the waxed handles you made for me. In the letter, you introduced me to the wonderful film by the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad: The House Is Black [1962]. Every time I touch those door handles in my house, I think of you and Farrokhzad.

NB That’s the only film she made in her short life: a 22-minute documentary about a leper colony in northern Iran. What’s incredible about it is how she describes beauty and ugliness as figments of our imagination, and that nothing is perfect.

A form of creative living was embedded within our friendship. Julie Mehretu

JM I was also moved by the intimate story of your father showing you this film as a child in Iran. And for me, there have been many points in working on my house that have come out of thinking about childhood memories.

NB Your house is both a puzzle made from memories and a genesis of future ideas. I have had the opportunity to stay there many times and, even when you’re away travelling, it’s full of friends and colleagues – like a collaborative space.

JM It was hard for me to think about making a space because there’s a lot of baggage around it. What’s beautiful about what you’re saying is this idea of investing in something that comes from this history. In fact, it’s not so much about the house itself, but about having had to leave behind a place and a home. To me, this feels like something we have in common: you left Iran and I left Ethiopia, after the failure of the dream that both our parents were building. That was the loss of innocence for me: coming to the United States and realizing I had to grow up quickly. Everything was put into a different perspective.

NB When, like us, you witness your family lose everything and begin to live in the past instead, you must create a future – not only for yourself but for the people around you. If I look at your earlier works, or mine, there is a direct relation to architecture in both. It has something to do with understanding how we create, define and share space.

JM I’ve watched you make several bodies of work – some collaborative, others not – and I’ve always wanted to ask how you work at such different registers? From the beautiful glass works you showed at the 2019 Venice Biennale [‘Dwindlers’, 2018–ongoing] to your facade commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [‘Scratching the Back’, 2023–24], to your playground-inspired series ‘Misfits’ [2021–ongoing], shown earlier this year in your South London Gallery exhibition ‘Jumbled Alphabet’, each body of work is unique. I’m curious: what informs these different aesthetic layers?

NB They all coexist. So, when I’m questioning the trauma of a sociopolitical context through materiality or form, I balance out that experience in the studio by making work as if there is a coexistence of something joyful in other work. It’s a balance between joyfulness and trauma, heavy questions, heavy materials, light ones, playful ones, poor ones. The layering you create in your paintings is not all that dissimilar.

JM And possibility and joyfulness have been part of survival, right? Although the trauma still exists. Another work of yours that I think about a lot is Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points [2017], which is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It comprises two large soft tinted pipes propped up and held together. There’s this aliveness in its obscurity, its insistence on abstraction.

NB As soon as you arrive within society, you’re expected to define yourself to prove you’re worthy of the space you occupy. But you have to resist that. As artists, given our biographical backgrounds, I have the impression that long ago – at the beginning of our decisions and the development of our perspectives – we may have shared similar thoughts about the foundation upon which our artistic contributions could take shape.

Choosing to work abstractly – I once coined the term ‘ambiguous/ambivalent abstraction’ for myself – across two fundamentally different media, sculpture and painting, might be the artistic common ground on which our friendship rests.

When you witness your family lose everything and begin to live in the past, you must create a future. Nairy Baghramian

Looking at our early works, I sense that space – how we inhabit and define it – and the connotations and hierarchies of spaces, played a central role for both of us. At the same time, we both sought to expand these spaces. It felt important to address things, to suggest directions, without being too explicit – otherwise, the space would close in rather than open up. I think it is about navigating within a realm of clear ambiguity. Abstraction, I believe, allows for a more undefined space and also protects us in our opacity.

JM I love that. Protection in our opacity. I totally agree. I love the term ‘ambivalent abstraction’ and the desire to expand these spaces of power and hierarchies, even in the expectations of abstraction itself. It really is about exposing the rigidity and authority embedded in abstraction, exposing the fault lines and the breaks. Inventing from a place of possibility. What I also find interesting is this insistence on using particular forms of language. As a young artist, I was very much informed by certain aesthetic conversations that were happening at the time. Some I thought were total bullshit; others were interesting and became guiding principles for me. Later, I found I had to work against those ideas in my own practice – a way to avoid getting too tied up in the space I created for myself was always to include others.

NB We both have a deep understanding of sharing space. I remember seeing your joint exhibition with Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris in 2018, or your long-term collaborations with Robin Coste Lewis and Jessica Rankin, respectively. My interest in collaborating started within one of my first institutional solo exhibitions, where I invited Jan Timme. That experience shaped my approach to sharing solo invitations, and I’ve since continued working closely with artists like Phyllida Barlow, Maria Hassabi or Janette Laverrière. I enjoy sharing space and evoking perspectives.

Since I don’t have a native tongue in the conventional sense, I see art as the language in which I’m able to contribute. Nairy Baghramian

JM Yes, absolutely. It makes me think of when I visited your show, ‘Modèle vivant’ [Live Model], at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2022. I was struck by how your sculptures play with spatial orientation. Some pieces confronted visitors with their backs turned toward them, creating a constant reorientation of perspective. The first thing visitors saw was the pairing of Roy Lichtenstein’s Head with Blue Shadow [1965] with your Se levant (mauve) [Rising, Purple, 2022] – a beautiful, large sculpture with unpolished aluminium elements. This made me rethink my approach to painting and sculpture, prompting new ways of seeing space and form, and this was when I felt the urge to collaborate with you on my new series ‘TRANSpaintings’ [2023–ongoing] – works on translucent monofilament polyester mesh – for the show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice last year. It was almost as if my paintings began to turn inside out – where an effort to describe space started to evoke the interior of the body, even abstractly.

I was first approached about the Palazzo Grassi exhibition not long after a big survey of my work was held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019. At that point, I didn’t want to do another solo show, so ‘Ensemble’ evolved into an exploration of the kinds of intimate connections between creative experiences that I’ve had with you and a handful of other artists.

NB At the Nasher Sculpture Center, Renzo Piano’s architecture prevents anything from being hung on the walls, so I invented suspended sculptural structures within which two opposingly oriented photographs evoked an invisible body in-between. Seeing these works while developing your TRANSspaintings, you asked me if I could devise a way to present your paintings spatially, front and back. And when I visited you at your studio in New York, I was blown away and I eventually found a way to integrate your translucent paintings in a manner similar to my spatial structures at the Nasher.

JM That process was invaluable. Your work didn’t just influence my spatial considerations; it liberated my approach to painting. It wasn’t just about positioning objects in space, but about trusting what emerges naturally in the process.

NB Your ability to interweave social and political themes within a painterly vocabulary is remarkable. Your work doesn’t simply depict; it creates spheres where viewers can interpret and engage on their own terms. Your concept of mark-making carries a sense of casualness, while also acknowledging its significance.

JM It’s fascinating because I see the same qualities in your work – this balance of lightness and joy, yet often underpinned by reverberations of violence, trauma or struggle.

NB My relationship with materials is fluid, much like relationships with people – some last, some don’t. I refuse to be confined by a single material, preferring to explore new mediums rather than staying within the familiar.

JM I love that.

NB Art has always had political and historical resonances. Since I don’t have a native tongue in the conventional sense – every topic seems to demand its own language – I see art as the language in which I’m able to contribute.

JM Perfectly stated – ditto.

NB Artists must remain anchored in the common good. I witnessed firsthand how, during the so-called revolution in Iran, art was deemed a threat by authoritarian forces. That reinforced my belief in art’s power as a form of resistance.

JM Exactly. As Toni Morrison said, ‘These are the times when artists must get to work.’

NB Sometimes I get the sense that, because institutions are often overwhelmed and curators frequently stretched, the pressure on artists to share exhibition space is huge. I only hope that in the future artists will not be forced to share their space until they’re ready to do so.

JM There’s a lot to be said about artists being asked to take responsibility for something outside of their remit at an institutional level – from being on museum boards, all the way through to curating exhibitions. I think this is something that, while it can be generative, also has its drawbacks. Working on my solo show for K21 in Düsseldorf, which opened this month, I saw first-hand how substantial the recent cuts have been to public funding for art institutions in Germany. But that’s a whole other conversation.

NB It feels like the whole cultural sector is in a very vulnerable place right now. We’ve lived through regimes that denied and forbade art, which led to the rise of dictatorships. We’ve seen that first hand.

JM And we’re seeing that again in the United States right now.

NB Losing ground for art is losing ground for democracy.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 

‘Julie Mehretu’ will be on view at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, until 12 October

Nairy Baghramian will be on view at Kistefos Sculture Park, Jevnaker, until 12 October

^{Main image: Julie Mehretu, Flo Me La (N.S.) (detail), 2017–18, ink and acrylic on canvas, 2.4 x 3 m. Courtesy: © Julie Mehretu, White Cube, London, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, New Art Center Foundation, Shanghai; photograph: Tom Powel Imaging}