Etel Adnan at Galerie Lelong

Galerie Lelong opens its first solo exhibition by the Lebanese-born artist and writerEtel Adnan (b.1925, Beirut) on April 2nd. Adnan‘s vibrant, expressive paintings, works on paper, and tapestries demonstrate her commitment to communication beyond the confines of the written or spoken word, and her use of color, shape, gesture, and perception help to create the landscapes for which she is well known in a variety of media. For the first time in New York, a film by the artist will also be on view in the exhibition.

Color and light are the two dynamics that inform Adnan’s ongoing series of landscape paintings of Mount Tamalpais (Marin County, California). Adnan has said that ‘light is everything for me,’ and the sunlight expressed in her paintings and other works is often symbolized by a red rectangle or square. Having left home at an early age, Adnan’s interest in and exploration of physical and emotional diaspora is evident throughout her work, with the concept of returning to a place strengthened through memory. As one of the most important voices in Arab and Arab-American literature, Adnan’s accordion-fold books (leporellos) fuse her visual and linguistic prowess, which Galerie Lelong will present along with one of the artist’s tapestries. Translating the rich colors and delicate sensory shifts of her paintings and works on paper to wool, Adnan’s tapestries recall the vibrant Persian rugs of her childhood.

Equally an artist, social observer, and commentator, Adnan was born in Lebanon in 1925 to an Arab father from Damascus and Greek mother from Smyrna. After being educated in Beirut, at the Sorbonne, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University, Adnan returned to Lebanon in the early 1970s. Six years later, after the first year of the Lebanese Civil War, Adnan moved to Paris where she currently lives and works.