Etal Adnan: Painting into Space
An exhibition celebrating the acquisition of a monumental work by Lebanese-born artist Etel Adnan, centered on an exploration of the intersections of painting and architecture in her practice.
The Bass Museum of Art
Miami Beach, FL
December 4 2023–March 17, 2024
Made possible with funding and staff from The Bass; realized within my responsibilities as Curator of The Bass
Etel Adnan (b. 1925, Beirut, Lebanon; d. 2021, Paris, France) is a leading figure in contemporary Arab American literature and visual art. She moved to Paris in 1949 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and then to the United States in 1955 to pursue a PhD in aesthetics and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught philosophy at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, before returning to Beirut in 1972 to work as a cultural editor for two daily newspapers. In 1976, after the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon, Adnan moved to Paris with her lover, the Syrian artist Simone Fattal, where she lived—with intermittent sojourns in California and Greece—writing, painting and making films until her death in 2021.
Painter, academic, poet, writer—Adnan pursued a wide-ranging practice inspired by cross-cultural experiences and a lifelong engagement with the natural world and politics. She created rich, geometric fields of color in her paintings and drawings, with compositions occasionally translated into large-scale murals and tapestries. In other works, texts and images coalesce into the form of the leporello, an artist’s book with folded, accordion-style pages that offers a unique engagement with space as it expands and unfurls. Adnan originally wanted to study architectural design before turning her attention to canvas and paper, once stating, “Architecture contains everything: form, color, social concerns.” She recognized the mural’s inherent connection to the built environment, a direct means of injecting art into public space.
Painting into Space presents a selection of works by Etel Adnan centered around The Bass’ recent acquisition of a monumental ceramic mural—the only one by Adnan in the United States—based on a sketch the artist completed in 2020. The exhibition focuses on the interplay of geometric abstraction—circles, squares and triangles—redolent in Adnan’s paintings and underlying her enduring interests in landscape and the spatial environment.
Booklet
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