Slouching Towards Bethlehem, First Seal (R 6:1)

In these four large-scale chromatic prints, Ethiopian-born American artist Julie Mehretu combines photogravure with traditional intaglio printmaking techniques. The underlying images are press photographs documenting recent anti-immigration protests in the United States, altered by the artist to the point of being unrecognizable, retaining only their "DNA." 

These images dissolve into complex compositions of nervous gestures and erasures that Mehretu executed on copper plates using various printmaking techniques. Since the mid-2010s, Julie Mehretu has collaborated with leading print studios to push the limits of technical possibility—for instance, increasing the number of press passes to achieve unprecedented overlays of forms and effects. The subtitles of the four works reference the broken seals in the biblical Book of Revelation, a distant echo of today’s era of turbulence and upheaval marked by a global pandemic, police violence, and the resurgence of authoritarian fascist ideologies. This assembly of gestures and forms, whose relationships appear indeterminate and uncertain, metabolizes and interrogates the world’s violence while simultaneously proposing a third space, in suspension—an "in-between" marked by a sense of openness to another possible future.