Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan was a poet, writer and painter, born in Beirut in 1925, who lived in Paris, where she died in 2021. She made paintings, drawings and tapestries, and leporellos: accordion-folded books that combine drawing and writing. She also wrote poetry, essays and novels, including The Arab Apocalypse.

She studied French literature at the École Supérieure des Lettres in Beirut from 1945 to 1949 and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1955 she continued postgraduate study in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard University. Her works include the drawing Plage Rose (2020). Her book Time, in Sarah Riggs's translation, won the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2020.

Her work was shown at dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel in 2012 and at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2014. Solo exhibitions were held at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2014), the Serpentine Galleries, London (Etel Adnan: The Weight of the World, 2016), MASS MoCA, North Adams (2018), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Etel Adnan: Light's New Measure, 2021). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.