.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Etel Adnan’s watercolours occupy an intimate yet vital place within her multifaceted artistic practice. Best known as a poet, writer and painter, Adnan approached each medium as a different means of experiencing and articulating the world. Her visual language emerged in California in the late 1950s and remained deeply rooted in her sustained engagement with landscape, light and colour. Although her compositions frequently approach abstraction, they are grounded in an acute sensitivity to place: mountains, seas, trees and horizons are distilled into essential forms and translated into a language of colour and gesture.
In the present work, a luminous ground is animated by sweeping strokes of ochre, yellow, green and black. Rather than constructing space through conventional perspective, Adnan allows the landscape to emerge through the rhythm of the brush, the transparency of the wash and the tension between concentrated passages of pigment and areas of untouched paper. This immediacy is characteristic of the artist’s watercolour practice. In contrast to the dense, tactile surfaces of her celebrated oil paintings, her works on paper retain the fluidity of her unique mark-making.
Since the 1950s, much of Adnan’s life has been spent in proximity to Mount Tamalpais in Northern California. In 1958, she began to paint the mountain. She writes: "Once I was asked 'Who is the most important person you have ever met?' And I remember answering: 'A mountain'. I thus discovered that Tamalpais was at the very centre of my being" (E. Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Sausalito 1986). For Adnan, painting was ultimately an act of being attentive to the world. Her works transform seemingly simple encounters with nature into profound meditations on existence, memory and place.
Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, Etel Adnan lived across multiple languages, cultures and geographies throughout her life. She studied philosophy, first at the Sorbonne in Paris, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there, at age 34, that she took up painting. Although widely recognised as a poet and writer for much of her career, painting became another mode of thought and expression through which she articulated experiences beyond language. Moving between Lebanon, France and the United States, Adnan often described her paintings as her only true home.
Her work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions including at Serpentine Galleries, London; Pera Art Museum, Istanbul; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Aspen Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern and Institut de monde arabe, Paris. Adnan received many honours for her contributions to the field of art and culture, including the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honour, in 2014.
In the present work, a luminous ground is animated by sweeping strokes of ochre, yellow, green and black. Rather than constructing space through conventional perspective, Adnan allows the landscape to emerge through the rhythm of the brush, the transparency of the wash and the tension between concentrated passages of pigment and areas of untouched paper. This immediacy is characteristic of the artist’s watercolour practice. In contrast to the dense, tactile surfaces of her celebrated oil paintings, her works on paper retain the fluidity of her unique mark-making.
Since the 1950s, much of Adnan’s life has been spent in proximity to Mount Tamalpais in Northern California. In 1958, she began to paint the mountain. She writes: "Once I was asked 'Who is the most important person you have ever met?' And I remember answering: 'A mountain'. I thus discovered that Tamalpais was at the very centre of my being" (E. Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Sausalito 1986). For Adnan, painting was ultimately an act of being attentive to the world. Her works transform seemingly simple encounters with nature into profound meditations on existence, memory and place.
Born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, Etel Adnan lived across multiple languages, cultures and geographies throughout her life. She studied philosophy, first at the Sorbonne in Paris, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there, at age 34, that she took up painting. Although widely recognised as a poet and writer for much of her career, painting became another mode of thought and expression through which she articulated experiences beyond language. Moving between Lebanon, France and the United States, Adnan often described her paintings as her only true home.
Her work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions including at Serpentine Galleries, London; Pera Art Museum, Istanbul; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Aspen Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern and Institut de monde arabe, Paris. Adnan received many honours for her contributions to the field of art and culture, including the Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France’s highest cultural honour, in 2014.