Simone Fattal. Des villes au fond d’un lac

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

In autumn 2026, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris devotes a major exhibition to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American artist born in 1942 in Damas and based in Paris for many years. Bringing together around a hundred works, the exhibition traces more than fifty years of her artistic career, from her early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Organized as a succession of groupings outside of any chronology, the exhibition's layout invites visitors to explore the guiding threads of a body of work marked by diversity and constant renewal. Passionate about literature and archaeology, Simone Fattal first studied philosophy at the École des Lettres de Beyrouth, then at La Sorbonne, completing her training with courses at the École du Louvre. At the end of the 1960s, it was in Beyrouth that she began painting, tirelessly depicting trees, the seafront, and the mountains, pushing the boundaries of figuration. In 1972, she met Etel Adnan (1925-2021), a Lebanese poet and painter, with whom she shared nearly fifty years of life and companionship. In 1980, forced to leave Liban because of the civil war, Simone Fattal settled in Californie, in Sausalito north of the San Francisco Bay. She then temporarily abandoned painting to devote herself fully to founding The Post-Apollo Press (1982-2017), whose name draws inspiration from the Apollo space program, in which she perceived the beginning of a new era in human history. Starting in 1988, she took up ceramics after taking courses at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute. From clay emerged archaic figures with anthropomorphic or animal lines, drawing inspiration from the mythological epics of the Mediterranean basin, mainly from Mésopotamie or Grèce antique, from the Épopée de Gilgamesh to l'Iliade and l'Odyssée. The 2010s marked the end of the editorial interlude of The Post-Apollo Press and her definitive return to Paris. Alongside her sculpture and the production of collages with intimate and collective narratives, landscape painting reappeared. Executed with lively strokes, colorful watercolors and black inks with plant motifs express her vision of a nature animated by an unlimited vital force. This first exhibition in a Parisian museum pays tribute to a major artist, internationally recognized but still rarely shown in France.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗