Etel Adnan — Découverte de l’immédiat — Lelong & Co Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 13 → March 12, 2022

Etel Adnan — Galerie Lelong & Co. La galerie Lelong & Co. présente une exposition émouvante et profonde autour des derniers travaux d’Etel Adnan, dont la disparition en 2021 a laissé la peinture et la poésie orphelins de l’une de ses plus brillantes orfèvres.

Over the course of 2021, Etel Adnan, who passed away on November 14 at the age of 96, has mainly concentrated on the production of an imposing series of paintings on canvas, mostly in monochrome. The artist, who previously took great pleasure in applying pure colour with a knife, chose a paintbrush and a single colour to capture what she describes as her “Discovery of Immediacy”: flowers, fruits, inkwells, flasks and more. In addition to these still life works, which are like pictural snap shots, she has also produced paintings entitled “Intrusion of the Memory” where souvenirs of mountains and landscapes are juxtaposed with the still life. Immediate data from the conscience and images emerging from memory thus coexist.

Etel Adnan has deliberately avoided simplicity or repetition. She continues to surprise us with these austere but luminous works, their coherence illustrated by their presentation in lines and groups.

The international audience for her work continued to expand in 2021 (exhibitions at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, the Centro C3A in Cordoba in Spain, the Centre Pompidou Metz and the production of a large ceramic work for the auditorium of the new Fondation Luma in Arles). 2022 will see exhibitions in Tenerife, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and more.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of a bilingual book with a text by Yves Michaud and will be held simultaneously in Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris and New York.

Etel Adnan was born in 1925 in Beirut. She passed away in Paris on November 14, 2021.