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Born in Beirut to a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, Etel Adnan (1925-2021) grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a predominantly Arabic-speaking society. An important representative of modernism, her artistic and literary work is characterized by a broad and dynamic exchange between the Arab and Western worlds. Poetess, jour- nalist, painter and philosopher, she has spent her life between Lebanon, France and California and has mixed very different art forms, media, lan- guages and cultures.
Caught between several languages in her youth, Etel Adnan finds her voice in painting rather than in writing. In 1996, she recalled:
“Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I did not feel the need to use words, but rather colors and lines. I did not need to belong to a language-oriented culture but rather to an open form of expression.»
The close link between writing and painting is an essential characteristic of her work.
Poetess and visual artist, Etel Adnan leaves behind her a body of work that mixes letters and visual arts, including poems, essays, novels, paintings, drawings, engravings as well as an important collection of «leporellos», large accordions of illustrated paper.
This vibration at the surface of the canvases of an international soul captivates us in its wake in this most beautiful exhibition written in color.
Etel Adnan Untitled, ca. 1970 LaM Lille métropole musée d’art moderne d’art contemporain et d’art brut Villeneuve-d’Ascq (France) Courtesy the Estate Etel Adnan