The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is devoting a major monographic exhibition to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American artist born in 1942 in Damascus who has lived in Paris for many years. An tireless explorer of materials and techniques, Simone Fattal produces a multifaceted body of work nourished by a wide range of literary, mythological and historical sources.
Her rich career is first rooted in the Middle East. It was in Beirut that she took up painting, inspired by landscapes. Forced to leave Lebanon in 1980 because of the war, she settled in Sausalito near San Francisco with her companion, the artist and poet Etel Adnan (1925-2021). Simone Fattal then temporarily abandoned painting and devoted herself to founding the publishing house Post-Apollo Press, dedicated to poetry and experimental texts, mainly feminist. Then, at the turn of the 1990s, she engaged in a practice of ceramics. Her archaic figures, anthropomorphic or animal, draw their inspiration from the mythological narratives of the Mediterranean basin. Alongside sculpture and the production of collages, painting reappeared in the 2010s, accompanied by works on paper: colourful watercolours and black inks inspired by calligraphy or nature.
This first exhibition in a Parisian museum pays tribute to a singular artist, a true free spirit, and bears witness to the richness and breadth of a creation that is always in motion.