Etel Adnan (1925-2021), whose radiant and intimate paintings have had a profound impact on modern and contemporary art across cultures and geographies, developed a visual language of remarkable clarity and emotional force. The essential concerns of Adnan’s practice include landscape, memory, displacement, and a deep spiritual relationship to place.

Born in Beirut to a Greek mother and a Syrian father, Adnan’s life and work moved fluidly between cultures, languages, and continents. She lived and worked in Lebanon, Paris, and California, geographies that profoundly shaped both her visual and literary output. While celebrated internationally as a poet, essayist, and philosopher, it was through painting that Adnan articulated a universal language of form and color, one that is at once deeply personal and transcendently modern.

Adnan began painting in the late 1950s, initially turning to the medium as a way to express herself outside the constraints of written language. Working on small canvases with a palette knife, she applied color in thick, vivid blocks to create abstracted landscapes that hover between memory and sensation. Her compositions, often centered on a rising sun, a solitary mountain, or the arc of a horizon, reflect her experiences of exile and belonging, as well as a profound attunement to the natural world. Mount Tamalpais in California, the Mediterranean Sea, and the mountains of Lebanon recur as motifs, each filtered through a deeply internalized and poetic lens.

Though modest in scale, Adnan’s work commands an extraordinary presence. Their stillness and luminosity invite quiet contemplation, drawing viewers into a world that feels both ancient and urgently contemporary. In an increasingly fractured and distracted visual culture, her work offers a form of resistance, insisting on slowness, introspection, and the enduring power of the handmade mark.

Adnan has had solo exhibitions in institutions around the world, including The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021), Pera Art Museum, Istanbul (2021); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2020); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2018); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2018); and lnstitut de Monde Arabe, Paris (2016). Her work has been featured in numerous international art festivals, including the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2015); Whitney Biennial, New York (2014); and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2013). Adnan has received many honors for her contributions to culture over the years, amongst them the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural achievement, which she was awarded in 2014.