ETEL ADNAN (1925-2021)

The prolific Lebanese-American artist and writer Etel Adnan tried her hand at many literary genres: poetry, novels, epistolary narrative, and autobiography. Born to a Greek Christian mother and an Ottoman Muslim father, Adnan grew up speaking Greek, English, Arabic, and Turkish, and was educated in French religious schools. Her first works were abstract compositions with blocks of colour, applied straight from the tube with a palette knife. Adnan’s interest was in the immediate beauty of colour, as though a language in itself. Her earliest paintings were suggestive of landscapes and included forms that referenced specific places. In the 1960s, the artist discovered Japanese Leporellos, unfolding accordion-leafed books, and began exploring this medium as a form of expression that intimately and masterfully unites drawing, painting and writing. Adnan claimed this as her own, specific contribution to painting—as though recomposing the narrative of a poem in conversation with drawing, ink, watercolour or graphite.

The present work reflects a tumultuous period for the artist, who wrote The Arab Apocalypse in 1975 and in response to the Lebanese Civil War. Here, words are replaced by drawings, lines, and comprised of dots as substitutes for sentences. Shaded rectangles give a vibrant rhythm to the work that describe a reality beyond words through the translucency and repeated movement of the forms and brushstrokes. Adnan's exploration of political and personal dimensions of violence abstractly articulates her experience of exile from familiar landscapes and languages. Her artworks now feature in numerous important collections around the world including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sursock Museum, Beirut; British Museum, London; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. In 2014, Etel Adnan was awarded France’s highest cultural honour, the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.