Etel ADNAN (Beyrouth - Lebanon, 1925-2021).
Lived and worked in Paris, spending her time between California, France and Lebanon.
Adnan is an American-Lebanese poet, writer and visual artist widely recognized as one of the foremost authors, poets and playwrights of her generation. Widely known for her literary work, she fluidly moves between the disciplines of writing and art. Polyglot, she writes in French, English and Arabic. She was brought up in the school of a French convent, and French became the language of writing in her early literary works. She studied English as a child and most of her later writings were written mainly in English. Caught between several languages, in her youth Adnan found her primary voice in painting rather than writing. In 1996, she recalls: "Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn't feel the need to use words, but rather colours and lines. I didn't feel the need to belong to a language-oriented culture but rather to an open form of expression. "At the age of twenty-four, Adnan travelled to Paris, where she finished her philosophy studies at the Sorbonne. Some time later, she left for America where she continued her graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. She taught philosophy of art at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael for several years, and has lectured at several universities in the United States.
Her paintings rose to prominence following their exhibition at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012); and she has had solo exhibitions at Mudam, Luxemburg (2019), SFMoMA, San Francisco (2018), Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland (2018), the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2016), UNAM, Mexico City (2017), Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2016), Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2015), Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2014), and Mathaf, Doha (2014). As well as group exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2017), MoMa, New York (2017), Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015), the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), the Whitney Museum of Modern Art (2014).
She has works in private collections as well as many public collections around the world such as MoMa, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunstsammlung NRW, the Royal Jordanian Museum, LAM, Lille, Guggeneheim, Abu Dhabi, Mathaf, Qatar, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the British Museum in London, Kunsthaus Zurich, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunisia. Adnan also has tapestries in public spaces and private collections. Slides of her tapestries are in the permanent files of the Contemporary Crafts Museums of New York and Los Angeles.
