Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Second Seal (R 6:3)

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, digitally altered by the artist to the point of being unrecognizable—retaining only their "DNA." 

These images merge into complex compositions of nervous marks and erasures that Mehretu executed on copper plates using various engraving techniques. Since the mid-2010s, she has collaborated with leading print studios to push the boundaries of what is technically possible, for example by increasing the number of press runs to achieve unprecedented overlays of forms and effects. The subtitles of the four works refer to the broken seals in the biblical Book of Revelation—a distant echo of the current era of turmoil, marked by a global pandemic, police violence, and the resurgence of authoritarian forms of fascism. This constellation of gestures and forms, whose relationships appear indeterminate and uncertain, metabolizes and interrogates the violence of the world and offers, in contrast, a third space—suspended, an in-between—marked by a kind of opening toward a different possibility.