Artworks

Etel Adnan Lebanese: b.1925 A painter, a poet, a ceramicist and a filmmaker, Etel Adnan moves fluidly between genres, working on her bold, yet gentle, abstract and landscape compositions from her adopted home of Paris. Born and raised in Beirut, Adnan first carved a notable path in the field of philosophy before redirecting her focus to artistic pursuits, a transition that was energised by strong political, anti-colonial convictions. While she is recognised as one of the most important voices in Arab and Arab-American literature, wider acclaim for her paintings began to accrue after Adnan’s inclusion in Documenta 13 in 2012 and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Adnan favours a palette knife over brushes, a technique she uses to create the areas of luminous colour in Untitled, 2015. The artist has said that ‘light is everything for me,’ and the sunlight expressed in works such as Untitled is symbolised by red forms enclosed in areas of contrasting hue. The painting is from her ongoing series of landscape paintings of Mount Tamalpais (in Marin County, California). Characteristic of the lyrical nature of Adnan’s oeuvre, it is rich with memory, longing and love for the earth.