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Overview

When I die, the universe will have lost its best friend.
– Etel Adnan

A respected writer, poet and playwright, Etel Adnan’s engagement with the social world of language is a vital part of a larger, complex practice that includes painting, drawing, tapestry design and a hybrid mixture of writing, drawing and painting – the leporello. Adnan’s works in the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection focus on paintings and tapestries as windows onto her inexhaustible dialogue with nature, colour and abstraction.

Through painting, Adnan conveys her private relationship to nature as living subject, each painting an ‘expression of an encounter’. As Simone Fattal has written, Adnan’s paintings are succinct, momentary. Each is executed in one sitting, constructed by the artist as she responds to vibrations and resonances of colour. In the late 1950s, Adnan began what would become one of the great relationships of her life – with Mount Tamalpaïs. The mountain would become her confidante, friend and obsession for the next two decades, and it continues to figure prominently in her work even today.