Gemini G.E.L. is pleased to present Julie Mehretu’s new Six Bardos series, featuring six new aquatints. The exhibition is on view from November 1st, 2019 in both galleries of Gemini G.E.L.’s exhibition space. Over three years in the making, Julie Mehretu’s new works are monumental in size and in their dynamic use of myriad colors. In late 2017, Mehretu began her collaboration with master printer Case Hudson’s team of six etchers on a new series of six large aquatints. In their scale, in the arrangement of imagery, and in the printmaking techniques used, the prints are extraordinarily complex. Ink is applied to the etching plate “a la poupée,” a technique that requires the handapplication of different ink colors to a single copper plate using a tarlatan pad. Instead of printing via color separation, the colors are lightly dabbed onto the plate, resulting in a gradient of colors that fade in and out from light to dark, obsuring one’s ability to discern foreground from background. Mehretu began this series after a trip to China, and the titles both refer to the stages of the soul between death and reincarnation, and the Bardos of yoga. The individual titles of each artwork in the series refer to the six levels of transitional states between death and rebirth, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Various marks and shapes collide to suggest calligraphy, automatic writing, political graffiti, gestural abstraction and abstract expressionism, cave paintings, and emergent figures. A mid-career survey exhibition co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, New York opens at LACMA in November 2019 and travel throughout 2020 and 2021 to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. The two largest prints from the Six Bardos series, titled Luminous Appearance and Transmigration, will be included in the exhibition, her first comprehensive museum retrospective.