Simone Fattal, Des villes au fond d’un lac

In autumn 2026, the Paris Museum of Modern Art dedicates an exhibition to Simone Fattal, a Lebanese-American artist born in 1942 in Damascus, Syria, and based in Paris for many years.

Bringing together around a hundred works, the exhibition traces over fifty years of her artistic career, from the early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Organized as a succession of sections and deliberately non-chronological, the exhibition’s itinerary invites visitors to explore the throughlines of a body of work with diverse facets and constant renewal.

A lover of literature and archaeology, Simone Fattal first studied philosophy at Beirut’s School of Arts and Letters, then at the Sorbonne, completing her training with courses at the École du Louvre.

In the late 1960s, it was in Beirut that she began painting, depicting trees, the seafront, and mountains, pushing the boundaries of figuration. In 1972, she met Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and painter, with whom she shared nearly fifty years of life and a creative partnership. In 1980, compelled to leave Lebanon because of the civil war, Simone Fattal settled in California, in Sausalito, north of the San Francisco Bay. She then temporarily abandoned painting to devote herself fully to founding The Post-Apollo Press (1982–2017), whose name was inspired by the Apollo space program, in which she perceived the dawning of a new era in the history of humanity.

From 1988 onward, she undertook a practice of ceramics after taking classes at the College of Marin and the San Francisco Art Institute. From the clay emerge archaic figures with anthropomorphic or animal lines drawing inspiration from the Mediterranean mythological epics, primarily Mesopotamian and ancient Greek, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The 2010s marked the end of The Post-Apollo Press’s editorial hiatus and her definitive return to Paris. Alongside sculpture and the production of collages with intimate and collective narratives, landscape painting reappears. Executed with vivid strokes, the colorful watercolors and black ink drawings bearing botanical motifs convey her vision of a nature animated by an unlimited vitality.

This exhibition at the Paris Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to an artist who is internationally recognised but has been little shown in France.

A catalogue prepared in close consultation with Simone Fattal completes the exhibition. Minimalist in its design, the monograph reproduces a broad selection of the works presented. Alongside substantial iconography, it offers unpublished texts, notably a contribution by Penelope Curtis, former director of Tate Britain, as well as a text by the artist herself and a biography. Blending critical rigor with intimate insight, this volume highlights the protean creativity of Simone Fattal, a visual artist, writer, and editor.