Etel Adnan

The exhibition gathers a series of works from the early beginnings through to the present day, and highlights her sculpture, a medium the artist has begun to engage with in recent years. Adnan likens her small-format paintings to poems: “Poems are small and compact. And my paintings on canvas are exactly the same thing. (…) Basically they are visual poems.” Artworks on view include a series of small-format oil paintings on canvas, produced between 1968 and 2017.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1925. She was educated at a Catholic convent run by French nuns in Beirut, and went to Paris in 1950 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. She later moved to the US and pursued postgraduate studies at UC Berkeley and Harvard.