Opening Thursday, February 13, 2025, 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Etel Adnan: On Paper, 1960-2021, a survey of works on paper by the late artist and writer, opening on Thursday, February 13, 2025. This is the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Adnan, who had her first solo exhibitions at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York and Paris in 2015. This exhibition is the first in the United States to show Adnan's works on paper in depth, including compositions in ink, pencil, pastel, and watercolor, and a selection of leporello artist books. These represent nearly six-decades of Adnan's creative output until her death in 2021. The works on view showcase her distinctive use of gesture and perception across mediums, drawing inspiration from a range of artistic genres such as landscape, still life, and abstraction. This exhibition is held in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth, and in conjunction with Etel Adnan: In the Rhythms of the World, a seminar celebrating Adnan's writing organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal and jointly hosted by the Poetry Project and Giorno Poetry Systems, New York.
The presentation begins in the 1960s, when Adnan worked primarily in an abstract, almost Symbolist manner. Several drawings depicting meetings of celestial bodies are made only with black ink on paper, as though while writing she felt a compulsion to make a drawing with her fountain pen. In a suite of drawings entitled O Moon (c. 1960s), she presents a poem on six sheets of paper, the lines of verse illustrated with ink sketches in the shapes of moons and boats. In select contemporaneous works, ink lines that evoke static shapes and figures are interspersed in fields of soft watercolor, gouache, and pastel, while in others the feeling is decidedly expressive, with the drawings acquiring a more frenetic, joyful energy. Across these early works, Adnan's burgeoning interest in both color and the natural world takes hold.