Etel Adnan, Pastel on Paper, French Painter (1925 - 2021)

Born: 1925 - Beirut, Lebanon. Died: 2021. Known for: Geometric and other abstract painting, watercolor and oil. Currently the focus of a significant career-survey exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, multi-lingual Etel Adnan was widely regarded as one the most significant voices of contemporary Arab-American culture. Born in Lebanon in 1925 to a Syrian father and Greek mother, her childhood was somewhat peripatetic, moving between Beirut and Damascus before journeying to Europe and the United States, first as a student and later as a lecturer and artist. Having gained notoriety at various points in her long life as a renowned poet and novelist, designer, essayist, and a professor of philosophy and aesthetics, Adnan found her voice as a painter in the early 1960s. Moving between different countries as fluidly as she has subsequently moved between mediums, Adnan’s practice matured to reflect this rich sense of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange, one rooted in her intense engagement with the world around her. 'The gesture of looking at an image, and the way you read a poem, gets closer to an affinity between the arts. You understand that visual art is a matter of meditation, like a poem. I find that rather wonderful.' — Etel Adnan Emotionally expansive and resonating with a serene sense of hope and optimism, Adnan’s color field compositions are nevertheless rooted to a traumatic sense of displacement and destruction that she bore witness to throughout her long life and would address more directly in her poetry and prose. Her intimately scaled canvases are especially adept at communicating a profound sense of the interconnected nature of place, memory, and identity, allowing Adnan to excavate the landscapes that had been lost to her. Drawing on an idyllic, imagined Smyrna, her childhood Beirut, and the ever-changing face of Mount Tamalpais in Sausalito, her instantly recognizable compositions tend to be dominated by ‘[h]ills overlooking distant lands, satellites circling colorful planets, and an immovable sun […] illuminating the beaches of her childhood in Lebanon.’i Composed off three, broad bands of thick, bold color crowned with a glowing butter-yellow disc, Untitled (#211) is typical of Adnan’s most recent work in its extreme distillation of the landscape into its constitutive parts of horizon, sky and dark, still expanse of sea or sand. The intensity of her palette here is indicative of her tendency to work with unmixed paints, applied directly to her small canvases with knives and spatulas. Provenance : In Private collection. Purchased from the Estate of Stephanie Fisher. Originally from New Orleans. She was a prolific collector of modern contemporary abstract work. Also she collected all sorts of art media. In her later years, she moved to Bal Harbor Florida, where she lived the rest of her years. Signed and lower right corner. Painting w/o frame 15" L x 19" W. W/ frame 19” L x 23.5” W. Packing & Shipping within US. California Shipping Prices will vary.

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