ETEL ADNAN

Born in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father, Adnan grew up speaking Greek, Turkish and Arabic at home, and French at school. She left to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, then moved to America in 1955, where she attended UC Berkeley and Harvard. It was not until her mid-thirties, while teaching Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, that she started painting. In the earliest of these tentative experiments, she painted by using up the ends of oil tubes, applying it directly to the canvas with a palette knife in decisive swipes. The spontaneity of this gesture offered a liberation from the constraint of writing in the formal language of her upbringing: ‘I didn’t need to write in French anymore,’ she said, ‘I was going to paint in Arabic.’

Adnan, who was renowned as a writer of poetry, fiction and journalism, came to widespread prominence as a visual artist following her inclusion in Documenta 13 (2012). Intimate in scale and charged with feeling, her paintings are composed of geometric forms rendered in swathes of pure pigment and result from working at speed. Even in the last years spent confined to her Paris apartment, this format would permit the same methodology: laying a pre-stretched canvas flat on the table, as if sitting down to a page at a writing desk. Viewed at a distance, the works register the world beyond, one stitched together with blocks and bands of vivid colour, and inky filaments that trace the contours of trees in the languid play of afternoon light. ‘Painting landscapes is creating a cosmic event,’ Adnan once wrote. ‘The actual space of painting – its very dimensions – is the space of memory.’

When she returned to Beirut in 1972, it was to a city and community on the brink of conflict, pervaded by a sense of urgency. Adnan had taken on the role of cultural editor for the French-language daily newspaper Al Safa, which gave her a platform for fearless, front-page editorials; she began having her poetry published in Arabic; and in 1973, she held her first solo exhibition at the avant-garde Dar al-Fan space. During the ensuing Lebanese civil war, she would write the novel Sitt Marie Rose (1977), an indictment of xenophobia whose publication provoked death threats, compelling her to eventually return to California in 1979. In 1980, she would publish L’Apocalypse arabe in French, a book-length poem strewn with hand-drawn glyphs. Such symbols make up a shared lexicon between the domains of language, sign and drawing, between Adnan’s writing and her leporellos or works on paper, examples of which are on view in this exhibition. The artist’s watercolour leporellos are folded books that extend to several metres long. Much like a scroll, they demand intimacy through handling and offer a durational experience of painting. Delaying gratification through the reveal of the pages and the interplay of surfaces as they unfold, the leporellos are Adnan’s reflection upon her twin positions as artist and as writer, and testify to her unique inhabitation of the space in-between.

The tapestries establish another connection between writing and painting – as Adnan succinctly observed, ‘a tapestry is one line after another.’ Taking inspiration from the flat weave of rugs and kilims, and encounters with weavers in Tunisia and Egypt, she started experimenting with tapestry-making in the 1960s. Unlike her approach to painting, however, the tapestries are fabricated by loom over expanses of time with a slower pace of production. Many of the new works that feature in ‘This Beautiful Light’ fulfil Adnan’s wish to transpose certain of her 1960s drawings to tapestry, and have been created posthumously with the help of Simone Fattal, her long-time partner, and the expertise of French artisans Pinton, who are known for their collaborations with Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder and Sonia Delaunay, amongst others. Similarly, a ceramic mural installed in the ground floor gallery is devoted to an apple tree drawing Adnan made, and points to the unrealised works and curtailed material explorations the artist was invested in at the time of her passing. It is as Adnan has written: ‘Some weight has fallen over my house (it spared the apple trees in the garden). In the interval, many thoughts expressed in many languages have piled up.’

Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon. In 1949 she emigrated to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris. From there she travelled to the US, studying at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. From 1958–72, she taught philosophy at Dominican University of California, San Rafael, going on to work as a cultural editor for two daily newspapers in Beirut between 1972–76. Her novel about the Lebanese Civil War, Sitt Marie Rose, was first published in 1977, winning the France-Pays Arabes Award, and has since been published in more than ten languages. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions around the world, including Pera Art Museum, Istanbul (2021); Mudam Luxembourg; (2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2018); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2018); lnstitut du monde arabe, Paris (2016) and was included in the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2015); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2013). Adnan has received numerous awards for her contribution to culture, including, in 2014, France’s highest cultural honour, the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She died in Paris in 2021.