Etel Adnan

For the first time in her life, she was speechless: “I didn’t want to read or write French; it was like a boycott, a rejection”. – Etel Adnan was born into a Greek-Syrian family and grew up in a multilingual environment: Turkish was spoken in her family, Arabic in the street and she was taught French at school. By the time she became speechless, she was already a famous French-speaking poet. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1949 and moved to the USA in 1955, where she completed her studies at Berkeley and Harvard University. Meanwhile, Algeria was in a war of independence. Like many other Arab intellectuals, Adnan was in opposition to French politics. She turned away from French and began to paint. She began to paint. It was a “painting in Arabic”, which for her was “a new language, a new world”. But it took decades before her artistic work was noticed by a wider public. In 2012 – Adnan was 87 years old at the time! – she was invited to dOCUMENTA (13) and became famous virtually overnight as an Arab artist of the 20th century. Adnans passed away on 14 November 2021 in Paris, France. Adnans’ first comprehensive retrospective in Germany was held at the Lenbachhaus in Munich from October 2022 to February 2023. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen also exhibited her work in the summer of 2023. In 2020, the Lelong & Co. gallery in New York exhibited her second solo show Seasons, with Adnans.