Simone Fattal: Des villes au fond d’un lac

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents a major exhibition devoted to Simone Fattal, bringing together around one hundred works spanning more than five decades of artistic practice, from landscape painting to ceramics and collage.

Rather than following a chronological order, the exhibition is organised into a series of thematic groupings, exploring the recurring subjects and ideas that have shaped Fattal’s diverse body of work.

Fattal’s early landscape paintings, developed in Beirut in the late 1960s, focus on trees, the sea and mountains, while exploring the boundaries of figuration. From the late 1980s onwards, ceramics became an important part of her practice. Her clay sculptures include archaic anthropomorphic and animal figures inspired by the mythological traditions of the Mediterranean, particularly those of Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Alongside sculpture, Fattal’s practice encompasses painting and collage. Her later landscapes, watercolours and black-ink drawings of plant forms explore nature and its vitality, while her collages and sculptures address questions of memory, history and collective narratives.