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Lot Essay
Aglow with sunkissed colour, Untitled is a radiant work dating from the spectacular final decade of Etel Adnan’s life. Painted in 2016, the year of her first UK solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, it belongs to the period of extraordinary international acclaim that brought the artist’s career to a close. Adnan had first begun painting half a century prior, inspired by the natural beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area where she was living and working at the time. Her distinctive abstract language, full of colour and feeling, was forged under the spell of the Californian sun, each painting a jewel-like celebration of chromatic intensity. Here, interlocking zones of peach, pink, green and azure combine with crests of luminous yellow. Like many of Adnan’s later works, it represents a fragment of memory, evoking the undulating landscape of her beloved Mount Tamalpais or the coastal light of her childhood in Beirut. Distilled to its essential contours, the work sings with the rhythms of nature, as succinct as a line of poetry.
Recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, which concluded in July this year, Adnan began to garner significant institutional attention after featuring at documenta 13, Kassel, in 2012. In the years leading up to her death in 2021 she mounted major solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021), followed by posthumous shows at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam last year. These surveys paid tribute to one of the twentieth century’s most compelling artists, writers and thinkers, celebrating a practice that spanned novels, poetry, journalism, criticism and plays as well as drawing, film, ceramics and tapestry. For Adnan, these diverse threads were united by a sharp, intense engagement with the world around her: from the tragedy of war and conflict, to the joy and hope of nature. This focus found vivid expression in her paintings. Working with a palette knife, often directly from the tube, she built her compositions with intuitive compulsion, energy and spontaneity. The results are alive with sensation.
Adnan lived a somewhat nomadic existence: her paintings, she believed, were her only true home. Born in Lebanon, she had moved to Paris as a student, where she read philosophy at the Sorbonne. She relocated to America to teach in the 1950s, eventually settling in Sausalito, while making regular trips to Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Tunisia. She returned to Paris in 2012. Adnan was inspired by Arabic art, calligraphy and poetry, but also by the works of artists such as Paul Cézanne, Nicolas de Staël, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Agnes Martin. Her paintings, too, are caught between worlds. While they represent deep and enduring expressions of place, they also capture the sensation of imagining it from afar. They are pictures of how landscape lives in the mind: bright, abstract and never still. For all its boldness and clarity, the present work is also fragile, held together by solely by the tremulous vibrations of colour. Like Adnan herself, it remains in constant flux, shifting and sparkling as it catches the light.
Recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, which concluded in July this year, Adnan began to garner significant institutional attention after featuring at documenta 13, Kassel, in 2012. In the years leading up to her death in 2021 she mounted major solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021), followed by posthumous shows at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam last year. These surveys paid tribute to one of the twentieth century’s most compelling artists, writers and thinkers, celebrating a practice that spanned novels, poetry, journalism, criticism and plays as well as drawing, film, ceramics and tapestry. For Adnan, these diverse threads were united by a sharp, intense engagement with the world around her: from the tragedy of war and conflict, to the joy and hope of nature. This focus found vivid expression in her paintings. Working with a palette knife, often directly from the tube, she built her compositions with intuitive compulsion, energy and spontaneity. The results are alive with sensation.
Adnan lived a somewhat nomadic existence: her paintings, she believed, were her only true home. Born in Lebanon, she had moved to Paris as a student, where she read philosophy at the Sorbonne. She relocated to America to teach in the 1950s, eventually settling in Sausalito, while making regular trips to Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Tunisia. She returned to Paris in 2012. Adnan was inspired by Arabic art, calligraphy and poetry, but also by the works of artists such as Paul Cézanne, Nicolas de Staël, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Agnes Martin. Her paintings, too, are caught between worlds. While they represent deep and enduring expressions of place, they also capture the sensation of imagining it from afar. They are pictures of how landscape lives in the mind: bright, abstract and never still. For all its boldness and clarity, the present work is also fragile, held together by solely by the tremulous vibrations of colour. Like Adnan herself, it remains in constant flux, shifting and sparkling as it catches the light.