Page 49 - Contemporary Art and Old Masters

ETEL ADNAN:
LIGHT’S NEW MEASURE
New York - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Exhibition On View October 8, 2021 through January 10, 2022
Highlights Six Decades of Work by Beirut-Born Artist and Writer.

Over the course of a lifetime that spans almost a century,
Etel Adnan’s creative and intellectual vision has been
expressed in many forms. In addition to being a visual artist,
she is a renowned poet, a prominent journalist, and the
author of Sitt Marie Rose (1977), one of the defining novels
of the modern Arab world. Adnan’s biography is notable for
its rich convergence of cultural influences. She was born
in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father; grew
up speaking French, Arabic, and Greek; and as an adult has
lived for extended periods in Lebanon, the United States,
and France. She began to paint in the late 1950s, while
Etel Adnan,
working as a professor of philosophy in Northern California. Untitled, 2018 Oil on canvas 16 1/8×13 1/8 in. | 40.9×33.2 cm.
It was a period when, in protest of France’s colonial rule in Courtesy the Artist and White Cube © Etel Adnan
Algeria, she renounced writing in French and declared that
she would begin “painting in Arabic.” While Adnan’s writings have been unflinching in their
critique of war and social injustice, her visual art is an
intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human
spirit and the beauty of the natural world. She has stated,
“It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.” Adnan
creates her paintings decisively and intuitively. Seated at her
desk with her small canvases laid flat, she applies pigments
directly from the tube, using a palette knife to render
compositions of radiant immediacy. Simple geometries
recur throughout her work: a red square anchoring abstract
forms, a bright circle for the sun, horizontal bands that
suggest the sky over the ocean. Her abiding subject of
Mount Tamalpais - the view seen from her home during
decades spent living in Sausalito, California - is evoked in
innumerable guises, shifting with the light and weather, and
continually dancing between figuration and abstraction.
Despite their modest scale and formal economy, her
paintings and drawings are potent visualizations of the
sensations of memory and momentary perception that
shape our inner lives. Adnan’s partner, the artist Simone
Fattal, has described her works as playing “the role the old
icons used to play for people who believed. They exude
Etel Adnan,
energy and give energy. They shield you like talismans. They
Untitled, 1983 Oil on canvas 29×29 in. | 73.7×73.7 cm. Private collection.
© Etel Adnan help you live your everyday life.” Excerpt.
WORLD of ART 49