Simone Fattal. Cities at the bottom of a lake
When: 18.09.2026 11:00
Where: 48.864641, 2.297008
Organizer: Admin
Gathering a hundred works, the exhibition traces more than fifty years of her artistic journey, from early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Organized according to a succession of groupings and outside any chronology, the exhibition’s path invites visitors to explore the lines of force of a work with diverse aspects 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 Beirut that she began painting, tirelessly painting trees, the waterfront and the mountains, pushing the limits of figuration. In 1972, she met Etel Adnan (1925-2021), Lebanese poet and painter, with whom she shared nearly fifty years of life and companionship. In 1980, forced to leave Lebanon because of the civil war, Simone Fattal settled in California, 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 is inspired by the Apollo space program in which she perceives the beginning of a new era in human history.
From 1988, she engaged in a ceramic practice after taking courses at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute. From the clay emerge archaic figures with anthropomorphic or animal lines that draw inspiration from the mythological epics of the Mediterranean basin, mainly from Mesopotamia or ancient Greece, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The 2010s mark the end of the editorial parenthesis of The Post-Apollo Press and the definitive return to Paris. Alongside sculpture and the production of collages with intimate and collective narratives, landscape painting reappears. Executed with bold strokes, colorful watercolors and black inks with vegetal motifs translate her vision of a nature animated by an unlimited vital force.
This first exhibition in a Paris museum pays tribute to a major internationally recognized artist who has remained little shown in France.
Tags: exhibition, ceramics, painting, art
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/simone-fattal-des-villes-au-fond-d-un-lac-117749
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