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Lot Essay
‘Sea, ocean, beaches have been ... my daily bread’ (Etel Adnan)
An atmospheric ode to the ocean, the present painting by Etel Adnan emits an aquatic, otherworldly glow. Palette-knifed strips of orange, yellow, and green float against a gleaming, textural blue-green ground. The marine expanse shimmers with depth and translucency, as flashes of light and darker shadows dance beneath its surface. The work captures Adnan’s fascination with the world’s vastness, specifically its seas. For her, bodies of water contain multiple identities and possibilities: there is ‘the primordial sea, the innocent one, the planetary one, with its temperatures, colours, sunsets and nocturnal shine—the one you look at innocently, or plunge into or remember’ (E. Adnan, quoted in A. Fitch, ‘The Non-Expressible Part of Thinking: Talking to Etel Adnan’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 8 September 2017, online). Executed in 1980, the present work was included in the 2016 exhibition The Weight of the World at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Adnan’s first showing at a public institution in the United Kingdom.
Born in Beirut in 1925, Adnan developed a fascination with words as a child: for much of her life, she would be known primarily as a poet. In 1949, she was awarded as scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and went on to continue her postgraduate education in the United States. Almost a decade later, in 1958, she took a teaching position in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it was then, aged thirty-four, that she began to paint. ‘Furiously, I became a painter’ Adnan recalled. ‘I immersed myself in the new language’ (E. Adnan quoted in K. Wilson-Goldie, Etel Adnan, London 2022, p. 66). Instead of using brushes, she was instinctively drawn to the palette knife, a tool which lent her surfaces a tactile quality. Adnan’s initial output was entirely non-representational, but soon she began to draw inspiration from California’s dramatic topology, which she summoned through an abstract idiom.
Luminous, evocative colour characterises Adnan’s oeuvre, as in the jewel-box tones and aqueous textures of the present painting. Ever conscious to nuances in form, Adnan delicately constructed her compositions in much the same way that she would a poem. ‘Creation,’ she reflected, ‘is a form of thinking. It’s abandoning a certain world of preoccupations in order to enter into another’ (E. Adnan quoted in L. Adler, ‘Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan’, The Paris Review, 4 October 2023, online). Adnan’s paintings are remarkable for their intensity of feeling, each canvas forming a vibrant universe as rich and real as our own. By suggesting rather than directly depicting the sea, the present work proposes an incandescent vision of the world.
An atmospheric ode to the ocean, the present painting by Etel Adnan emits an aquatic, otherworldly glow. Palette-knifed strips of orange, yellow, and green float against a gleaming, textural blue-green ground. The marine expanse shimmers with depth and translucency, as flashes of light and darker shadows dance beneath its surface. The work captures Adnan’s fascination with the world’s vastness, specifically its seas. For her, bodies of water contain multiple identities and possibilities: there is ‘the primordial sea, the innocent one, the planetary one, with its temperatures, colours, sunsets and nocturnal shine—the one you look at innocently, or plunge into or remember’ (E. Adnan, quoted in A. Fitch, ‘The Non-Expressible Part of Thinking: Talking to Etel Adnan’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 8 September 2017, online). Executed in 1980, the present work was included in the 2016 exhibition The Weight of the World at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Adnan’s first showing at a public institution in the United Kingdom.
Born in Beirut in 1925, Adnan developed a fascination with words as a child: for much of her life, she would be known primarily as a poet. In 1949, she was awarded as scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and went on to continue her postgraduate education in the United States. Almost a decade later, in 1958, she took a teaching position in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it was then, aged thirty-four, that she began to paint. ‘Furiously, I became a painter’ Adnan recalled. ‘I immersed myself in the new language’ (E. Adnan quoted in K. Wilson-Goldie, Etel Adnan, London 2022, p. 66). Instead of using brushes, she was instinctively drawn to the palette knife, a tool which lent her surfaces a tactile quality. Adnan’s initial output was entirely non-representational, but soon she began to draw inspiration from California’s dramatic topology, which she summoned through an abstract idiom.
Luminous, evocative colour characterises Adnan’s oeuvre, as in the jewel-box tones and aqueous textures of the present painting. Ever conscious to nuances in form, Adnan delicately constructed her compositions in much the same way that she would a poem. ‘Creation,’ she reflected, ‘is a form of thinking. It’s abandoning a certain world of preoccupations in order to enter into another’ (E. Adnan quoted in L. Adler, ‘Beginning with Color: An Interview with Etel Adnan’, The Paris Review, 4 October 2023, online). Adnan’s paintings are remarkable for their intensity of feeling, each canvas forming a vibrant universe as rich and real as our own. By suggesting rather than directly depicting the sea, the present work proposes an incandescent vision of the world.