This new Etel Adnan catalogue is produced to accompany the artist’s first solo exhibition in a UK public institution, titled The Weight of the World. Adnan’s unique career — spanning several decades and including as wide a range of media as it does traditions and continents — has made a significant contribution to the artistic, cultural and political landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries. Presenting the impressive diversity of Adnan’s practice, the publication includes reproductions of her paintings, drawings, poetry, film, ceramics and tapestries. The title of this publication and the exhibition is taken from a new series of paintings completed specifically for this show.
The catalogue includes a foreword by the Serpentine Galleries’ Director of Summer Programmes, 2016, Julia Peyton-Jones, and Artistic Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist - who has also written an introductory essay to Etel Adnan’s work. Critic and writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie has contributed an essay that places Adnan’s art within the political and social context that has inspired it. Robert Grenier, poet and writer, has contributed a tribute to Adnan’s ability to grasp the essence of a landscape. The publication also includes artist and publisher Simone Fattal’s writings on Adnan’s practice.
There are three book covers to select from, each depicting a different painting from Etel Adnan’s series The Weight of the World.
Etel Adnan
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Etel Adnan, (b. in 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon) studied at the Sorbonne and then Harvard, in the late 1950s Adnan taught philosophy at the University of California and started to paint.
From the 1960s until the present day, Adnan has also made tapestries, inspired by the feeling and colour of the Persian rugs of her childhood. Never translating existing paintings into tapestries, she uses specific designs for her textile works. Over the course of the 1960s, Adnan moved away from purely abstract forms and, in 1964, discovered ‘leporellos’, accordion-folded sketchbooks in which she could mix drawing with writing and poetry. Often working in series, her painting continued to move between recognisable and imagined forms, revealing her sensitivity to colour and shape extracted from the environments in which she found herself.
Her writing, too, contains multiple references and responses to the politics and violence in the world around her. From her earliest poem in English, which addressed the Vietnam War, to her award-winning 1978 novel Sitt Marie-Rose, she explores the political and personal dimensions of violence and articulates her experience of exile from familiar landscapes and languages.
Adnan’s artworks feature in numerous collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Mathaf, Doha, Qatar; Royal Jordanian Museum; Tunis Modern Art Museum; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; British Museum, London; World Bank Collection, Washington D.C.; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. In 2014, Adnan was awarded France’s highest cultural honour, the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
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