Etel Adnan: Poetry of Colors

Born in Beirut, Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a Lebanese American poet, painter, and philosopher. Her artistic and literary work is characterized by a great and lived exchange between the Arab and Western worlds.

The work of the poet, journalist, painter, and philosopher, who spent her life between Lebanon, France, and California, combines very different art forms, media, languages, and cultures. After the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan refused to continue working in French and showed solidarity with Algeria: “I didn’t need to write in French anymore, I was going to paint in Arabic.” Her political clarity, as well as the close connection between writing and painting, became an essential feature of her oeuvre. The exhibition at K20 presents works from all of her creative periods from the 1960s to 2021, thus paying tribute to the diversity of Etel Adnan’s oeuvre, which spans more than six decades: paintings, drawings, tapestries, leporelli, texts, and a large ceramic wall piece. The exhibition presents the artist’s work in thematic chapters. These are themes that accompanied Adnan throughout her life and had a strong influence on her work. At the same time, selected chapters provide an in-depth look at Adnan’s chosen genres.

An exhibition of the Lenbachhaus, Munich, and K20 K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, curated by Sébastien Delot, Director of the LaM, Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne d’art contemporain et d’art brut.

Etel Adnan and the collection of K20, Dusseldorf
In 2018, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, under the direction of Susanne Gaensheimer, was already able to acquire paintings by Adnan, some of which belong to the artist’s impressive early oeuvre, such as the painting Persian from 1963/64, which influenced the visual appearance of the Düsseldorf exhibition as a whole. These acquisitions fit naturally into the museum’s collection, as the artist also refers to the pre-war avant-gardes such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, who, like Henri Matisse, are part of the initial holdings of the Kunstsammlung. Adnan’s references to these three artists are manifold. For example, during her time teaching philosophy of art in California, Adnan included Kandinsky’s text On the Spiritual in Art in her teaching. About Paul Klee, whose diaries she read as soon as they were published in English in 1964, she said: “I think Klee was the first painter I fell in love with. He obsessed me. By obsessed, I mean that his paintings put me into a state of ecstasy.”

This preoccupation is visible in the form of individual resonances in the exhibition Etel Adnan. Poetry of Colors: Selected works from the holdings of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen complement the exhibition. Thus, for the first time, it will be possible to see a work by Henri Matisse in direct proximity to works by Adnan.

New acquisitions 2022
In 2022, further acquisitions were made, which are now presented in the exhibition for the first time. These include Etel Adnan’s large-format tapestry Séjour Estival, the design of which dates back to the 1960s. Susanne Gaensheimer, director of K20 and K21 Dusseldorf is particularly pleased to have succeeded in acquiring two ceramics by Simone Fattal. Etel Adnan met the artist and art critic met in Beirut in 1972, and they lived together in Paris and California until Etel Adnan’s death.

Exhibition catalog
A comprehensive catalog has been published to accompany the exhibition.

From now on: free admission for children and teens at K20 and K21.

Stay connected: Please check our website for regular updates on our program. For further information please contact: presse@kunstsammlung.de.